Building over a Sewer

This is a quick post on the long saga of getting permission from Wessex Water, our water supplier, to build over a main sewer line.

We have a mains sewer running underneath our plot, right under the end of our building.  As it is impractical to move the sewer pipes, you need permission from your water supplier to build over it (or even within a 3m radius).

My usual approach would be to just do it, but without a signed paper from Wessex Water, you won't get Building Regs approval as they want to see the paperwork. 

So I went ahead and got in touch with the "build over sewer" department of Wessex Water. Every water supply company has something like that. You can either run a quick questionnaire online or get in touch with them to see wether you get a automated permission (if you're fairly far from the sewer and building with strip footings for example) or you have to hand in all plans with possibly a few structural calculations (in my case due to piling) and they will have a look over it with their engineers.

This whole procedure, with first contact, started in April 2019. The whole application cost something around 360£, so not too bad for a Utility company. They managed to send an engineer out within 6-7weeks, who realised when he was on site, that his CCtv setup wasn't long enough to reach to our site from the next manhole. He had to re-book a specialist cctv guy from Wessex water, with a longer camera set. Another 3 weeks and by beginning of July I finally had the CCtv survey of the sewer line done. Result :all good, no problems, pipe is in tact and we can now send them out foundation plans for engineers check.

Send in all the relevant papers at the middle of July, and heard......... nothing. 

Came back to them via email beginning of August to check any progress, again..... Nothing. 

Went on holiday and phoned the guy in the middle of August, from my holidays, to see what had been progressing....... Nothing at all has been happening, as they didn't receive any paperwork in the first place. So they say. 

So my first 6-7emails went through fine with all the pre - booking organisation. The cctv result summary email went through OK as well, and then all over sudden the next 3 emails- with the plans and the checkups on wether they arrived or not - disappeared apparently. Not to be found on their system. 

After an afternoon of mid size rage which included me chopping up firewood for the next few months for my inlaws, I send the whole plans again to a different email address provided by the guys from Wessex Water and done 2-3 safety copies which included sending it from different addresses to all available addresses of Wessex Water with a note asking for confirmation. 

They did confirm and so it went ahead it s "regular" way. 

Which includes 3 times asking for further information that was included in the original papers (just not on page 1, but further in the middle) and finally wanting a Method statement from the piling contractor. This was beginning of October 2019 and they received this within 3-4days, which lead to them verbally agreeing that building over the sewer line would be fine "we just have to put together the paperwork, you ll have it ASAP". This ASAP must be Utility company talk for "within this century" cause 4 weeks later and a checkup call every 3-4days, no papers in sight as of yet. 

Summary of the whole story:

If you're building over or near sewer, start with applications as early as possible and KEEP ON CHECKING if they been processed. 

Utility companies are slow. Very slow. 

I appreciate that they are very busy as well and have a lot of people wanting something done NOW. So lesson learned. Hopefully. 

UPDATE:

After not receiving any papers from Wessex Water for another 2 weeks, i decided that it was time to escalate this a bit and went to the Head of Departement of WessexWater in order to complain.
This magically resolved the lot of the problems and I did get my written permission within a day including an apology for causing this massive delay.