Meeting electricity company to discuss wayleave termination / pole move. Any tips?

[flanagaj]

Cut a long story short.  The electricity company want 25k to move an electricity pole 2 metres to our boundary.  I personally feel that they are trying to get us to pay for them to upgrade their old pole.  The rest of them in the line were replaced a few years ago, but as there was a structure near to this pole, they obviously didn't do it.   Said structure has now been removed, and I was going to try and play it, that having the pole on the boundary will make any future work a lot easier for them as the land on the other side of the boundary is an empty paddock which will never be developed on.

We are not expecting to not have to contribute in some manner, so just wondering whether to simply use the "ease of maintenance / access" with them when we meet on site tomorrow so as to try and reduce the 25k that they want.   The pole doesn't really need to be removed, but if we don't move it now, the new dwelling will be very close to the pole and any future maintenance that is required, will be very difficult for them to achieve.

Edited January 30 by flanagaj
spelling mistake

[MikeGrahamT21]

Absolutely, it’s partly for their benefit. Ask for a full quote showing how much for each component of the works, that can sometimes beat them into submission when they have to prove what the money is going towards

[BlackMountainBuild]

We got National Grid to remove a pole and bury a cable from the preceding pole (we dug the trench) for not that much (in the end it was circa £2500). It also started out at £20000, but once we started taking out the trench digging, and talking through what actually needed to happen they were fairly reasonable. Try and see if there is anything you can do to help with cost - also find out if they actually have a current way leave agreement, they had lost ours so we agreed to sign a new one, and finally the old pole would have been under 5 metres from our new build so not to code apparently, I don't know if that makes a difference to the pricing but they did come and deal with it pretty swiftly. It was a fairly good experience in the end, and I've never had so many people work for me (sort of), for so little money, must have been 20 people over 5 different teams on site over 3 days. Equally our electrician said he'd had clients in similar situations not pay anything, because they were obliged to remove a pole which would be dangerously close for free, but I could not persuade anybody at the National Grid to go for that one.