when I rented a house years ago it was always freezing. Speaking to some locals who had lived in the village for ever they said it was previously marsh land and that’s why no villagers bought there. I only lived a few miles away in the town but I’d only ever been to the pub in the village. The moral of the story is - ask locals who have no vested interest!!
When I bought my house I knew that the bottom of my garden floods as it’s doing right now. It does it 2-3 times a year. My house building is in zone 1 which means it’s got a less than 1 in 1000 chance of flooding per year. It’s about 40 years old. There are plenty of older properties on land with much worse flood risk, but there’s something dodgy going on if builders are putting up new houses in a high risk zone.
Its about time it got more like cars - people being told BEFORE they buy a new house that is on or blocking off a flood plain by the insurers telling them that their insurance will be maybe £4k a year to cover the 100% likely chance of their ground floor being flooded. Rather than insisting on just energy surveys, they should insist that all new houses come with a bit of sticky tape on the front door showing where the water will be if the nearest waterway rises in level 1 or 2 metres . Builders can build it but the customer should be told by a third party that they will not get insurance, if the builders push through an appeal. Its more insurance costs that stop people buying likely to crash cars than other factors. Dredging rivers or making them narrower with flood defence walls just shifts the floods downstream to where the torrent piles up at a bridge or some other natural feature. In fact what stops floods is the water meadows (fish lakes included) being able to flood and store water. If you live somewhere that floods. Move.
Or build new houses above ground level, with a void space below to use as low risk storage or a car port. Or better still, stop building houses on floodplains and focus on utilising the empty shops that are plentiful on every high street in the country. Getting people to reside in town and city centres will rejuvenate the high street. More people, more customers, more shops again.
But surely everybody gets a survey done before they buy especially if they're getting a mortgage? Before you get that far it's dead easy to look up your flood risk on the Environment Agency website. Town Planners will usually refuse permission for housing on other than greater than 1/1000 per year flood risk. Agreed the water meadows (like I live next to) are vital.
There is a planning application near us to build houses on land that used to be the boating lake for the Lord of the Manor. The area is now silted up but locals all know that it is always wet whatever the weather. It is probably lined with clay, similar to the nearby canal built around the same time.
I don't think your standard residential mortgage valuation even looks at that sort of stuff, admittedly a while since I bought a house but probably only picked up if the solicitors are instructed to provide an environmental survey. The commercial property valuation reports I have prepared do contain advice as regards the risk of flooding though.
Correct , and the original ditcher's that dug AND dredged them did it by hand .....and here we have diggers that can scoop 2 to 5 ton at a time ...Hello .
The searches done by the conveyancer will include a flood report We haven’t had surveys done on the last few places we bought but then again I’m a builder and can solve any problem with a suck of air over my teeth and a slow shake of the head.
I live pretty close , less than half a mile from the sea , our house is around 130 years old( it’s never flooded) when we did surveys etc it was suggested there were no flood defences allocated to our house so insurance may be high. Between us and the sea is a street of modernish houses, (saltmarsh lane ) I would guess 80s build on , they have flood defences due to being built on a marsh , apparently the sea can readily get to my house without impacting on these houses consequently we have no flood defences Annnyyyyyyywayyyyy They have been building closer to the sea in an area that has flooded almost every year, there’s plenty of land here and the flooding area was obviously cheap to buy so they allowed planning permission, like you would, new planning requires buildings to be elevated by one metre , not enough height for a garage and they drop the roof level/ eaves so the houses don’t look disproportionate to the surrounding ones , seems a lot of agro and definitely future agro as they know 100% that it does and will flood again, why not just build a bit further away. They also declared the sea defences ineffective and are removing them at the minute , this has been met with much joy and another 1000 houses planned over the next few years are planned
The original Home Information Packs were and extremely solid idea, and were blocked primarily by the Royal Institute of Surveyors with ridiculous quotes such as you wouldn't buy a car on the word of the seller alone - failing to mention that much of the HIP was supplied by 3rd parties and/or from independent sources. They had a lot of information, far past the energy survey in each. Currently, I want to buy a house, mortgage company runs the briefest of brief surveys*. Should I withdraw, there might be several survey's as opposed to the single one a HIP would have required. *I've heard that some of the survey's are conducted via a drive by, or google streetview and/or pull information from ones done in the past. As for councils allowing houses to be built on historical flood plains - well, some of that gets community centers built or some councilors new cars. Flood plain info is available on the Land Registry on an open to all platform for a nominal fee.
I know of a house that has been built on foundation's that will in the very near future collapse but the builder knows it will be out of his warranty period when it happens.
I don't know why you think HIPs were a good idea. Although working in commercial property it wouldn't have effected me it was one things that I did agree with the RICS view. There were a number of problems foreseen with these such as the upfront cost putting potential sellers off, how long the HIP could be relied on i.e. would it be time expired after a number of months and then the seller forced to get another? Who was going to police the information within, not to mention how reliable it was. You positive view of human nature might be considered naive what would have stopped a seller getting a second survey if the first didn't meet their expectations and what about reports prepared by surveyors who against institution rules were effectively bought. The final thing if I remember rightly was that of contract law when you instruct a consultant to provide advice the contract is between those two parties, when you introduce a third party things become more complicated.
New houses are being built around here on old landfill ground and on land prone to flooding. One parcel of the landfill is now built on and already the new occupiers are complaining of cracking and wet interior walls and gardens flooding as their houses were built in the path of a natural springs area. Talking to the new residents it turns out they were not made aware of the landfill or flooding issues and relied on solicitors to do searches. Coupled with this, the developers want to sell their houses and they have no obligation to buyers, its up to buyers to find out the bad stuff themselves. The developers bought the land cheap, they knew is was landfill and they knew it had water issues, but they relied on piling to stabilise the ground which is steeply sloping. The Council wants new homes built and seem to give planning permission relatively easily. These new builds are 'fleecehold' which is a recent thing in the new build market, where the freeholders are locked into a covenant forcing them to pay 'management fees' for the upkeep of the estate including roads, paths, sewage system, green spaces and so on. These management fees are unregulated and the freeholders have no protection in law. The Council likes fleecehold as they don't have to maintain the development which is effectively private, and the residents have to pay the full Council Tax. Its a win win for the Council and developers. But a poor and risky deal for the home owners. The Council has recently granted planning permission for 2 adjacent sites which are both worse regarding landfill and flooding issues. Its all about money.
Me too. Second highest hill,in our town. The first, has a reservoir on it! I would be very worried if we flooded!
