During the build process of Edwalton Business Park which became the home of The Campbell Clinic and two other significant businesses, we had to accept a ‘section 278’ order as part of the planning permission.
This means we had to accept the disadvantage of having to build and pay to build a pavement from the edge of Edwalton Business Park to the edge of the next commercial site which was about 100 yards.
That length of pavement had four street lights and cost £67,000 to build.
Because of the new answers of section 278 and working with the highways agency we had to pay that amount twice and then wait to have a refund of half of the money (the second lot we paid) once the project was signed off as completed.
I will always see that pavement as my pavement even though it doesn’t belong to me and we have no right over it whatsoever.
Since the pavement was completed it’s now been dug up five more times.
Once because Western Power distribution hadn’t connected the substation properly so they just turned up and dug up the pavement.
A second time Western Power distribution came and dug up the pavement again beside the substation and I’m not sure why, perhaps they were bored or just needed a bit of digging so, that was the second time it was dug up.
There have been two other times where builders have arrived and dug up aspects of the pavement related to services in one of adjacent commercial property sites.
Finally, the builders have returned who built our site to connect one of the lampposts which is unconnected.
It turns out again that Western Power distributions schematics of the power system around us are categorical in explaining that the wire that connected to lamppost 4 is a live wire and they will not broker any dispute as to the fact that wire is live.
When the road was dug up and the wire was tested it was not live and that meant that the pavement had to be dug up again so that a new wire could be connected to the substation because it hadn’t been connected properly in the first instance and therefore there was no power to the lamppost.
It doesn’t really matter does it because you could just leave the lamppost without any power because it’s not really important but then we will never be paid back the second half of our money (£67,000) for completion of the pavement because part of completion of the pavement is that the lampposts work.
Welcome to the world of commercial property development.
Imagine that Western Power distribution had done their job properly in the connection of the substation and in the distribution of the wiring to the lamppost and on the other two occasions that the builders had dug it up again they’d managed to do things properly before they dug it up.
It might be that ‘my’ pavement would still be untouched instead of having 5 separate bits of road works carried out on it in less than a year.
All of our work is the same as this isn’t it?
We rush to get things finished, we don’t do them properly or as properly as we could and therefore we then again end up digging up our own pavements that could have been left un-dug if we had just spent a little bit more time in the first place doing the work properly.
Fancy a bit of commercial property development?
Re-read the above and think again.
Blog Post Number- 2864
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