This area has had a long history of issues between developers and council, as I suspect most do. The FTTC cabinet that serves the area is only there because the council adopted the road early after a bunch of wrangling with the developers concerned.
I'm beginning to understand their pain. This is from the section 38 agreement governing the road adoption process in my immediate area. The maintenance period is the 12 months between being provided a provisional certificate and the final adoption inspection.
Now I'm not a lawyer but this seems pretty clear. During the maintenance period keep the road to be adopted in good order and fix anything that you find wrong.
The below email from a developer seems to indicate they disagree:
Again I'm not a lawyer and could be, and indeed probably am, wrong, but I'm not sure that ignoring the defects until the inspector has highlighted them and rejected the road due to them is keeping to the paragraph in the agreement above. I would have thought that the developer should be doing a little more than just noting the defects, fixing them would've seemed to be more compliant.
I have, of course, brought this to the attention of the local authority. Because I'm nice like that.
I'm not holding my breath for the developer remedying the issues any time soon, which is bizarre as you'd have thought they'd be desperate to rid themselves of responsibility for roads, not drag the process out.
Input on why they'd do this welcome. The cynic in me says that they are hoping the highway inspector won't see all the issues they are aware of and they can save money on repairs, instead having the taxpayer pick up the tab post-adoption. That is just me being cynical, right?
