Our Road Will Never Be Fixed Due To A Loophole

Living on a street scarred by potholes is a reality for hundreds of Brits.

However, for Sarah Ahmed and her 13-year-old wheelchair-bound daughter, potholes and flooded roads make getting out of their front garden an everyday battle.

Mother of four, Sarah Ahmed, 35, has been trying to leave her home on dilapidated Mayfield Avenue in Bolton, Greater Manchester for years and has encountered problems including car damage and rat infestation due to the unsatisfactory condition of the road.

The local council refused to fix the road because they hadn’t ‘adopted’ it, leaving residents in limbo and shelling out for repairs themselves, to the point that one resident was forced to hire a digger.

A loophole in planning laws means roads like Mayfield Avenue and neighbouring Bradford Avenue fall into disrepair and will never be fixed, allowing housing developers and local councils to refuse to maintain unadopted residential streets.

Nearly 260,000 (20 per cent) of the almost 1.28 million roads in England and Wales have not been adopted by a public authority and so are not maintained by the taxpayer.

Data provided to a newspaper outlet by GeoPlace, which compiles details of English and Welsh streets, reveals that 18 per cent of streets in Bolton are unadopted, ranking 86th out of 175 local authority areas.

According to GeoPlace street data, 28 per cent of streets in Bradford are unadopted, the 29th highest out of 175 local authority areas.

In Kirlees, a whopping 57 per cent of roads are unadopted or private, which takes the top spot only behind the Isles of Scilly.

Areas with high levels of unadopted roads also include Conway, Wales at 46 per cent, Tower Hamlets in Greater London at 45 per cent, and Portsmouth at 43 per cent.

When developers build new housing estates, they will usually make a deal with the local council to bring it up to a particular standard before the authority accepts responsibility for repairing potholes and more.

‘Section 38’ agreements allow the highway authority to ‘adopt’ the road, making it maintainable at public expense, but it requires the council to make sure the developer brings the quality of the road up to scratch and for the authority to take steps to take on that responsibility.

However, if developers don’t meet these requirements and the council does not make them, the burden of maintenance then falls to residents.

This is not actually a loophole. It’s a fact that unadopted (private) roads are not covered by the council, and this should have been pointed out to the buyer prior to the purchase of the property, but what happens, and who is responsible for the maintenance of an unadopted road if the properties are owned by the local authority or housing association?

Basically, it’s up to the council that you belong to. They determine if they want to make themselves responsible for the unadopted road. Some are considerate and they will, and some others can’t be bothered and won’t. Typically, it’s down to the people who live on the street to put money in each year for the maintenance of the road they live on.

There’s actually a very easy solution to this problem though. The council fixes the road and whatever else is necessary and then they put the council tax band up a level so that any forthcoming repairs can be done.