AIBU to think my new home developer can't put a wildlife corridor in my garden

[Homemoans]

I've just bought a new build house, when we moved in we realised that the developer had fenced a strip of land at the side of our garden off, when we asked why they said it's a wildlife corridor. The boundary on the deeds is the second fence so we immediately on completing took down the internal fence. They are now saying we need to reinstall it or they may contact the council who will Inforce it?! Surely this isn't possible for them to dictate what we do within our boundary. I'll try and attach some pictures if I can work out how to make this a bit clearer

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Hedgehog Street

We have one on an old country track at the back of our house - goes back to medieval times and is a wildlife corridor. It's lovely, there are foxes, deer, geese, frogs, toads, bats, owls, hawks, badgers, hedgehogs,woodpeckers and loads of other birds, voles, shrews, mice. Wild garlic grows there, honeysuckle, wild roses, sloes, and there are lovely trees- including apple and plum. It goes into a fantastic untouched dene about a mile away where there are Kingfishers.

If it wasn't there our garden- 40ft now, would be 70/80ft but I would rather have the wildlife corridor.

Lulu that sounds absolutely gorgeous. I have serious envy!

Our garden is walled on all sides. Someone said there was a hedgehog living in it, but I've never seen it, and judging by the state of my tomatoes and peas, it's not eating enough slugs. Alas! I believe it is long since dead, and would love to put a family of hogs in there, but don't think it would be fair to wall them in, even if I knew where to find some - they're certainly best left where they are. How can I make a hedgehog access hole in my bloody walll?

Lulu that sounds beautiful! That's how a wildlife corridor should be!

Boaty, I think they say to cut a couple of bricks out the bottom of the wall. It doesn't need to be huge just the size of a cd case.

It doesn't belong to you. It's a ransom strip. The Land Registry plan of your property will only be taken from the TP1 plan, which is the Transfer deed you and the developer signed. You would have had to sign the TP1 plan to confirm the plan accurately represented the extent of the property you were purchasing.
There are no 'Deeds' to check. Everything is held electronically for new developments.
Please listen to PPs and go back to your solicitor. Half the posts on here are hilarious in their inaccuracy.

So basically Lulu you're Beatrix Potter how lovely!

Agree that you should see your solicitor asap. Very important to find out what's what and only they can tel you.

However, and I'm trying to say this gently, don't you think that its not only important but also rather a privilege to have a wildlife space in your garden? Look at it this way. Assuming that your house is built on a greenfield site, you, your neighbours and the developers will have done quite a bit towards destroying local wildlife habitats for several generations to come (depending on the quality of the build). Maybe that is justified - there is a serious housing shortage in some parts of the country. But presumably the local council thought, at the same time as allowing your new houses to be built, that the local wildlife was also sufficiently important to impose some planning conditions to try and protect it. Why try to override these? To some people that might perhaps look both stupid and selfish.

Can I illustrate this point by a story? (It's nothing to do with being Beatrix Potter as previous poster suggested; though Potter was, for her day, a keen conservationist.) I live where there there are hedgehogs - they come to the porch in the evenings in search of left -over catfood. A few years ago, a 9 year old boy was staying with us. When I said 'look- here's a hedgehog!', the little boy came running. He said he wanted to see the hedgehog in real life because he'd only ever seen one in books . He literally did not know how big or small they were. I thought that was so sad - for thousands of years, children have seen and marvelled at and sometimes played with wildlife. Do we really want our generation of children to grow up so totally out of touch with the real world around them?

That's very well put flora, I agree whole heartedly.

Rolling
Just call me Beattie

Does the corridor connect one open area to another, or two woods, so squirrels, hedgehogs can travel between the two? The 0.1% will have been designated by the Council as a condition of the planning permission.
Though if no one checks or cares you might get away with taking the fence down, though I would have expected someone from the Council to have checked.

There are gaps under my fence but I've never seen a hedgehog here. I love them, little prickly flea-ridden critters

Is there some way I could attract them? I want a colony to eat my snails!

Flora. Having had a quick look at the ariel satellite views of the OPs development BEFORE it was developed on Google Earth I don't think you need worry about too much wildlife being destroyed. It looked like it was a mostly paved light industrial site with little or no greenery

Chicken-flavoured cat food and a bowl of water, apparently, Lynda. And nice boxes or a log pile for nesting, with plenty of cover like long grass. My friends are too tidy-minded to let their grass grow, so they put hay down by the hog chalets!

Ooh I can do all that. I'll probably get rats rather than hogs knowing my luck

Lulu your country track sounds idyllic! Who needs more 'garden' when you have that - it's worth more than any lawn space or cultivated patch!

I'd love hedgehogs - we have a large, rambling scrubby undeveloped patch of land for a garden. It's bursting with wildlife, we have a rabbit warren and the rabbits can be found on the lawn in the mornings. We have a regular fox visitor (but we have dogs so we never see it, only see its poo!). And we have birds of all shapes and sizes. I once even found a buzzard roosting in one of our trees at night, just a few feet above my head refusing to fly away because it was dark!

But I've never seen a hedgehog here! It's quite possible they're here and we just don't see them. If we put food out it would get taken by rats or our resident sea gull who steals everything (he tried to eat a bar of soap that I left out yesterday!).

Anyway back to OP - check your deeds, and embrace the wildlife corridor if in fact that's what it becomes.

There are a few areas that just don't have hedgehogs anymore.
I put my hedgehog food underneath a tile, its held up by a couple of bricks either side, so just enough to keep cats and foxes out.
Their poo is quite distinctive, its black (if they've been eating beetles you can see little shiny bits in it) an inch or so long, fairly round and a lot of the time it will have a point at one end. If you have them they are mucky things so you will see the poo.
The fleas are also host specific so you don't have to worry about your dogs or cats picking them up.

You know what I would do with that corridor? Yes, I'd take the fence down, but I would replace it with an avenue of fruit trees, and allow the natural creep of vegetation to fill in the corridor, or plant wildflowers there if the natural plants can't get a foothold. It would be lovely to make it a wildflower garden there, buzzing with bees, fluttering butterflies, full of life.

I want some hog chalets now...

Homemoans in the absence of your deeds, you could search for the planning application for the development on your council's website. You should be able to obtain the planning decision with the planning conditions, to see whether there is a condition relating to the wildlife corridor.

It's all there online - I didn't link to it for OPs privacy (although the location is easy to find from what she posted).

I think that the fact it has caused so much discussion and differing views on here shows that it's not a clear cut case and that the maps are very open to interpretation. Which means that the solicitor should really have been much better at clarifying things before you bought the house!

It also depends on what you've been told by the developers... I bought a flat from developers years ago - and what they told me I'd be getting when they were trying to sell it to me was very different from what they put in the actual contract they sent to be signed - not helped by the fact that (as I subsequently discovered) the development had gone bust and new developers had come in, were still using the old brochures that promised the earth but they weren't honouring the promises.

I managed to get some of the promises I'd been made honoured - they eventually put in a washing machine and a dishwasher but they weren't the built in ones they should have been. And it took months to get them to finish fitting the built in cupboards - they'd not bothered to put doors on all of them, then tried to put non-matching ones on as they'd run out of the original ones. So I can well imagine a scenario where you would be told that a part of your garden would be yours when actually that wasn't the case.

And in my current house which is about 20 years old - there's an old hedgerow and drainage ditch behind it so the fence is built a couple of metres inside that line in places and is a different shape to the boundary. There is a single wire fence that shows the boundary but it's so difficult to get to that although I try to check it is there every year, I haven't yet this year, and I always worry that the sneaky people over the road will snip it and try to claim it for parking as they're trying to slowly clear the rest of the hedge... We also worry because the shape of the garden was also changed on our deeds by the land registry when they top of the drive was altered before we bought it - sort of making it along the wood fence line rather that the wire fence line, and along the inside rather than outside of a hedge, and cutting off a point. We're currently trying to sort it with them now and it's not fun. Not sure if it happened because the original map would have been from pre-digital days and automatic software just assumed rather than accurately copied over the boundaries. And not sure why the previous solicitors didn't pick it up either - I guess they were focused on the bit that was supposed to be changing rather than thinking that the rest of the map would also need to be double checked.

Sorry, bit of a long post. But just to say that I can really understand how easily this would have happened with different people saying different things and having a map with more than one black line, that's different from the red lined map that you were shown - really bad practice from the developers - I'd push that they deliberately set out to confuse when doing those different maps, so they could pretend to sell the land but not actually do so...

Would love to know what your solicitor says to explain it all!

And hope you get your soggy gardens sorted out... you might yet end up with a mini stream at the end of your garden to take the water away!

I agree, I'd be inclined to see the benefits of a wildlife corridor. I've deliberately let our hedge grow think and a wild area at the far end of the garden and it brings lots of birds and butterflies here

From those plans the outer black line marks the estate boundary - what the developers own.

The second black line is your fence.

Sorry but why would you think you owned a piece of land even though on every plan it had been marked clearly with a boundary line?

as to the neighbours removing their fences. Who is to say they haven't been told the exact same as you and are in the process of reinstating the fences.

still. you will have to get the deeds and see for yourself exactly what you own but from what you have posted the boundaries are very clear and the pink section still may not be yours until it is written in the deeds and even then its likely it wont be.

You should also be happy about the wildlife corridor. They are proving essential for bees and beneficial insects as well as birds and mammals by providing routes within urban environments. The idea is they link larger habitats together and improve diversity and reduce the risk of population decline because habitats are less isolated. That's why lots of councils are now allowing grass verges to grow. They create these much needed habitats for a lot of our own endangered species www.countryfile.com/countryside/10-most-endangered-animal-species-britain a list if you are interested. The majority are insects. Theres a lot on the 'at risk' lists too. Currently not in danger zone but certainly on their way there.

You need to discuss this with your solicitor/conveyancer.

The Land Registry official register plan will determine what you own. The plans you have put up here are, I think, probably just the developer's plans. They may, or may not, be the same as the transfer/TR1 plan on which the Land Registry official register plan is based. However, it is not unknown for the plot plans given to prospective purchasers to differ from the transfer plan as things develop on the ground, and developers don't always update them as they should. If there is a discrepancy your conveyancer should have picked it up, assuming he/she knew about the original plan. However, the first thing is to establish what exactly you own. What you think you see "on the ground" is not always consistent with the legal ownership.

Secondly, even if the strip falls within your ownership, there may be a planning condition or other matter that affects it and which effectively takes precedence. Again, your solicitor should have told you about this.

Speak to your solicitor/conveyancer and check the actual position. You need to know your legal position and the actual facts. I think it most probable that the developer is correct in what they are saying (you could, of course, check this out with the local authority - although that might risk enforcement action). It is possible that you could have some action against the developer if they misrepresented what you were getting or your conveyancer if they have been negligent or, most likely, it could just be a misunderstanding. In any case, you need to establish the facts first.

I think it was probably precipitous to take the "internal" fence down given what you had been told about the existence of a wild life corridor. Personally, I think it sounds rather nice, and a good thing. But in any case, if it is a condition of planning, you risk enforcement action, so I would be careful about checking the facts and your legal position before creating too many waves.