Randomiser

Not sure, I would worry it would become misspelt as Corpse Corner!

Following your son’s suggestion how about shortening that to Thunder Box.

Would it cost more to go across the back of the house? How wide is the house in total, about 6m? Assuming that 6m with the Utility 2.5m wide by 2.0m deep and you go across the back you would add c.7.0m2 versus your current plan adding c.7.5m2. Plus you would have to build less new wall, your plan needs you to build 8.5m or new external wall, going across the back would only require c.5.5m. Yes, if you open up the back of the existing house you will need to add steel to support the wall above, but overall I can’t see it being dramatically more than you existing plan.

Presumably the poles they attach the cables to are in excess of the minimum required height. If that is right I guess the only way they will below the required height is due to excessive sagging or topology, i.e. the two poles the cable runs between being in dips with the land in between being higher. Does that make sense?

You say there is a wayleave in place, did you grant this to the DNO when you bought the property or when the equipment was installed if you already owned it? Having they been paying you? Even if the answer to the first question is "no" meaning the wayleave probably fell away when you bought the property, if the answer to the second question is "yes" there may well be an implied wayleave. Assuming there is a wayleave I would suggest looking at this from the DNO's perspective. You have legal permission to have your equipment on a piece of land. There is nothing wrong with your equipment, it is performing perfectly well and it is structurally sound. The landowner has now decided for their own reasons that they want the cable put underground. They want you to pay the cost of this. Does that sound reasonable? In terms of the trees, I believe the same law that gives the DNO the power to ask for the granting of a Necessary Wayleave also gives them the ability to gain access to land to cut back trees threatening their equipment. You have not mentioned what the cost is. I have a vague recollection that the DNO has to publish a standard set of chatges for this type of work, have you checked they are abiding by their own charging schedule? As it happens I am also getting a DNO to underground a cable at their cost, but in that case they never had a wayleave, so basically installed the equipment on somebody else's land without anyones permission. The Necessary Wayleave process is very lengthy, as I am finding, but in your case it sounds like you would need to terminate the wayleave first.

You mentioned further up that the pipes 'shoot left into next door'. Do you mean they go from your house directly in to your neighbour's house without going outside, or that the pipe goes outside your house into your garden and then in to next door's garden?

What does your title say? When the house was split and sold the title would have had to be split. Was the title splkt before you bought or was it split to allow you to buy the separate house? Ideally it should cover things like access rights to deal with drainage issues, etc. Did you solicitor highlight anything?

I believe the law changed within the last 10 years so that any drainage pipes serving more than one house became the property of the water companies, even if under a private garden. I only know about this because of the impact for building over agreements. But very few of these pipe runs are mapped and known about by the water comapnies in my experience.

The extended room will be relatively long and narrow, so do you plan to have a single run of units down one side galley style? Will the existing kitchen become more reception space? As Russell mentions an extension across yhe back may be a better option if possible.

Thanks for looping back with the cost. Too late for you, but how did the £67 per m2 compare with the cost of the Lynx product?

Looks a challenging site, but a lovely one once you have finished. I wondered where you sourced the screw piles? When I looked at them they were prohibitively expensive versus driven piles - typically twice the cost.

OK, this is no doubt going to turn out to be a very dumb question, but what the hell if you don't ask you don't find out... We expect to be using piles, if we ever get to the point of building, but I have been mulling over the possibility of an insulated slab. Our proposed house has an attached garage and I wondered how this would be dealt with in an insulated slab, surely you would not insulate under the garage floor but if not how is it part of the same slab?

Was it a concrete post you drilled out ?

Great to see you out of the ground and thanks for a really helpful blog. We exchanged mails last year on piling, I wondered if you used the piling company you were looking at then? I think our situation will be similar and it is unlikely we will be able to have the ground beam in a trench, so we will likely have to shutter. And thanks for including the figures, that is amazingly helpful.

Sorry if I am confusing things. I served notice in June last year, that is what triggered them to make the Necessary Wayleave application. They applied on the basis that we were trying to reach a voluntary agreement, which is what the guidance says is expected of the parties, that means nothing happens for 6 months. If after 6 months nothing is agreed then I think the Necessary Wayleave process carries on with a written or oral hearing. My plan would be to refuse the written hearing in favour of the oral one as that likely costs them more and hopefully pushes them further towards moving it being the lower cost. What I want to check is that the cost of moving the cable at my cost is one of the things for which there is a fixed schedule of costs. I do not want to lose the Necessary Wayleave process and then admit defeat and say I will pay for SSEN to decide that will cost me £100k so they recover some of their costs.

Unfortunately my excitement has been short lived. More reading has revealed that apparently there was a case on this precise matter and in 1997 the court decided that the limitation in sub-Paragraph 4 only applies to new electricity lines. I can't find any more details, but reading the wording again I would not be surprised if it did not hinge on the use of "...to be installed..." where in my case (and I guess the one in the 1997 decision) the cable is already installed. I would still like to find the case if I can, as the difference could be that the electricity company has never held a wayleave, so must have installed the cable without any consent. I do not know if that is the same as in the case from 1997.

Yup, the cable is strung off poles.

I have this morning been looking at what the actual legislation says, it is covered by the Electricity Act 1989. I am hoping that others on here can sense check my reading of one part of the law relating to Necessary Wayleaves. I believe the relevant section is Schedule 4, Paragraph 6 which I have copied in full below: My reading is that the situation I am in is covered in sub-Paragraph 2. Sub-Paragraph 3 says the Secretary of State can give a Necessary Wayleave on the terms they see fit. But sub-Paragraph 4 seems to pretty clearly say that the Secretary of State will not grant a Necessary Wayleave if it is on land covered with a dwelling. This seems to be exactly the situation in my case, both the existing and approved houses will be on land under the line of the cable. I therefore read this to mean that the DNO's application for a Necessary Wayleave is bound to fail. I would be very grateful for any input from others on how they read the relevant sections.

Yes, but only be signing a wayleave I presume, I absolutely do not want to do with the cable still in my way.

Unfortunately not. It seems that if you serve them notice they need to apply for the Necessary Wayleave within 3 months, but they are clearly well set up for this and in my case did so 2 days before that deadline. The notice period is 12 months. I need to check but I presume that if they have not secured a Necessary Wayleave within the twelve month notice period they have to remove the equipment, but my guess is that they probably have a further grace period to do it in. Interestingly I had another email last night saying that even if we agree the plan of undergrounding the cable at their cost with me signing an easement it can take a year for the work to be scheduled. Clearly they are doing everything they can to try and make it as inconvenient as possible. The email went on to say something along the lines of "but if you want it done sooner you can always pay for it to be done". I have replied saying a delay is no issue for me as I can begin enacting the planning consent before I need their cable moved and then the planning permission runs forever so I will just it out. Everything I read suggests that the process for securing a Necessary Wayleave is time consuming and expensive for the DNO and there is no provision in the law for them to recover their costs even if the person serving notice submits no argument to the panel reviewing the Necessary Wayleave application and does not even attend the hearing. I am hoping that will work in my favour. They have 5 months left before the notice I served runs out, they have not even provided the plan of the proposed rerouting of the cable underground, let alone started any discussion between solicitors on the easement agreement. I am going to stop chasing them and I will now move in to 'go slow' mode. At some point presumably their legal team will be asking if they need to progress with the Necessary Wayleave application with the associated costs, I am hoping that I will then have a bit more leverage. This is now becoming a bit of a point of principle.

Sadly that smell of success has been in the air a long time. But I thought it may be helpful to others if I shared experience to date, about 11 months after starting this thread. After months of discussions with SSEN I was finally advised by one of their own wayleave team that the only way to get any traction with having the powerline that runs over our land with no wayleave or easement moved at their expense was to serve notice to have the equipment removed. This I did in June. I then followed up a couple of weeks later and was told that as a matter of policy SSEN will not respond to such notices until the very end of the allowed 3 month period. After more and more chasing, well after three months from the date I submitted the notice, I received an email with a number of documents attached. One of these was a copy of their application to the Govt. for a necessary wayleave. Amusingly in that document it said it was only a back-up option as they were in negotiations with the land owner. I sent more emails asking when, having told the Govt. they were in negotiations, I might actually hear from them. Nothing for more weeks. Eventually just before Christmas I had an email from a new person in the wayleave department asking if we could meet on site to see what could be done and we finally met in the first week of January. At the outset I said it had been a very painful process. After initially being defensive he did as much as admit that it was a deliberate tactic adopted in the hope that most people would lose the will to live and just pay for the work themselves. Having spent half an hour there with a colleague from their design team and another from the team that would carry out the work he said he would recommend that they underground the cable at SSEN's expense if I agreed to dig the trenches and would sign an easement - exactly what I had proposed to his colleague some eleven months earlier! I dropped him an email earlier this week and apparently he is still waiting for the proposal of the cost split to be approved. He has also advised that it could take months to get the work scheduled. So my advice to anyone in a similar situation is that if this is now standard practice for SSEN then if you want to avoid the cost of moving cables start the process as earlier as you possibly can, because it could take 18 months or more to get it done.

If it is still relevant I have managed to get a condition amended as part of an application to discharge pre-commencement conditions, though there was a linkage because of the nature of the amended condition, relating to tree protection where we wanted to reposition the tree protection fencing to allow us slightly alter the layout of parking which was part of a pre-commencement condition. So we could not discharge one of the conditions in the way we wanted without modifying the other condition. But as we can not have the amended condition discharged yet due to its nature the case officer simply discharged all the other conditions then asked us to agree to a 12 month extension to the discharge of the condition that was amended. It was very helpful of the officer.

You may well be right, but there is nowhere in the Act I can see that defines a chimney or its construction and looking at page 11 of the document from Planning Jungle you linked to which covers Part G it does show a masonry chimney as one of the additions. In that case the chimney in the diagram it has been built inside the side wall, but given what the Act says about "...on a wall..." I can't see how that is mandated. In terms of "reasonable", the word does appear in the Act, but not in any of the sections that seem to be relevant here, so I suppose it comes down to the planners needing to be reasonable in the application of the law. If I recall the phrase used was something along the lines of what the man on the Clapham omnibus would think reasonable, but as I have had pointed out to me the man on the Clapham omnibus is quite likely to be a City lawyer or banker these days so I am not sure how good a test it is ? I am planning to make a trip to the council to see the duty planning officer tomorrow and I may add this to the list of points to pick up with them.

I am not a lawyer, but I have spent a lot of time in my work looking at and agreeing complicated commercial contracts, so I feel reasonably comfortable reading legal documents, therefore unable to find something that gives a simple description I have had a look The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015. There is nothing I can see which is helpful in the definitions. In Schedule 2, Part 1 A.1 and A.1 (e) it states "Development is not permitted by Class A if - …(e) the enlarged part of the dwellinghouse would extend beyond a wall which - (I) forms the principal elevation of the original dwellinghouse; or (ii) fronts a highway and forms a side elevation of the original dwellinghouse;..." I read this to say that the principal or side elevations that you cannot go in front of are formed by walls. But there is no definition of a wall in the legislation. I have therefore looked in other parts of the legislation to see if there is any clue as to whether a chimney would be considered part of a wall. There is no mention of chimneys in A., however, G. is a short section on chimneys, flues, soil and vent pipes. I think there are two relevant points in G.1 and G.1 (c), this states "Development is not permitted by Class G if - …(c) in the case of a dwellinghouse on article 2(3) land, the chimney, flue or soil and vent pipe would be installed on a wall or roof slope which - (I) fronts a highway, and (ii) forms either the principal elevation or a side elevation of the dwellinghouse." First, the chimney is described as being "installed on a wall". If something is installed on a wall it seems hard to argue that the thing on the wall is part of the wall itself. A chimney is part of a list including pipes, I find it hard to see how anyone could argue a pipe is part of the wall to which it is attached. There is no mention of what the chimney is made of, so the fact it is made of brick does not appear to be a factor. Second, the Act is set up to exclude what is not permitted development and by definition anything else is permitted development. The exclusion in G. (c) relates only to article 2(3) land which is basically Conservation Area, AONB, etc. This means that anywhere that is not article 2(3) land it is permitted development to install a chimney on to the principle elevation of a dwellinghouse. We already know that in A.1 (e) an enlarged part of a dwellinghouse cannot be permitted development if it is in front of the wall forming the principal elevation. The Act say you cannot enlarge the dwellinghouse in front of the principal elevation, but you can add a chimney, flue, etc. to the principal elevation if you are not on article 2(3) land. That suggests to me that the chimney, flue, etc. can't be considered an enlargement of the dwellinghouse and therefore can't be part of the wall forming the principal elevation. After all that my conclusion is that the answer must be that the Chimney in the example at the top of this thread would not be used to determine the principal elevation and the diagram on the left hand side would be correct. Does anyone think I have got this wrong?

I guess no concern other than the obvious, that a PD side extension could be limited to coming as far forward as the front of the chimney and not be allowed to come to the front of the house. If I were to go ahead with this I would likely be upsetting the planners by pushing hard on the bounds of PD, so I could see a scenario where an unhappy planning officer is happy to have found a way to frustrate the scheme.