To think a Solicitor might be able to help with this or am I wasting my time?

[girlfriend44]

I have been housing a BT openreach signal box on my house wall for many years. (wayleave agreements for anyone who dosent know)
BT are supposed to have an agreement with you if you have their property on your land as our people who supply electricity pylons etc.

It turns out through investigation that there was never an agreement in place for a box to be on my property all these years.

Openreach have offered me about £200 for all those years ive had the box plus agreeing to keep it on the house going forward?

You are not allowed to remove the box yourself otherwise you can be charged with malicious damage in order to get the £200 you have to agree to keep the box up there forever.
Everything is on their side and the payment is crazy, not to mention if i hadnt investigated it would never have come to light.

They agree the payments are low but say thats the most they will offer. I can fill in a form and get the payment and be done with ti.
OR
Would it be worth me contacting a solicitor to see if they can negotiate a higher payment or am I wasting my time.

Anyone had similar or know?

i agree with this, you’d be surprised how little wayleave payments are. I know someone who gets £13 a year for massive pylon cables to go over their house. Why they bought it is beyond me, the humming drives me nuts.

I regularly see wayleave payments coming through various farmers accounts. They average around £3 a year 😅 I'd definitely just take the £200

Worked with Openreach daily in my last role, I’d take the £200, they would only
negotiate a Wayleaves agreement in extremely rare circumstances.

In 6 years I think I saw an increased payment maybe twice in probably over 500 cases I dealt with. Both were for infrastructure placed in areas of the countryside where it would cost a fortune to reroute and even then it wasn’t a significant increase in the payment.

If you don't want it just get them to take it away

No it dosent serve my property.

There's nothing really to see its just a box on a wall with wires.

That's not 200 pound a year that 200 pounds for all the years it's been there and ongoing from now on. It's peanuts. I don't benefit from the job either.

so what?! It literally doesn’t affect your life at all, doesn’t cause you any inconvenience. £200 in return for nothing is a great offer! If it DOES affect your life and inconvenience you, get it removed and move on ffs! you’re not going to be getting more money you greedy git

This is exactly what I came on to say. If you don't want to take the £200 then get it taken off, but talk of getting solicitors involved is ridiculous

Don't understand the cranky responses. You're right to expect a better explanation of why this thing is on your property and what your rights are.

Apart from the money, I'd be more concerned about access and repair over the years.

Did you use a conveyancing solicitor when you purchased the property? Maybe they can help.

A one-off consultation with a sol would be £100-200 so perhaps not worth it.

So it could be a box that was installed a lifetime ago and been there ever since with no worries ?

And you wonder there is no record of any wayleave aggrement?

They don’t generally do no win no fee for things they are not clear cut wins.

This isn’t the pay day you are hoping for. Give it up.

Say it’s been there 10 years, that’s £20 a year to rent a small square on your house.

I think you are coming across as wanting your cake and eat it, either accept the £200 or have it removed and you won’t have to think about it anymore. Or spend thousands of pounds trying to sue BT for trespass (would it be trespass?)

personally?

i'd ask them to remove it.

openreach are a bunch of incompetent idiots and there's no way i'd want any of their infrastructure near my house if i had any sway in it.

absolute shambles of an organisation -the idea that they could even pay you the £200 properly or arrange to not damage something when insisting they need "access" for maintenance is a joke. if they parked on your driveway and reversed into your flower bed you'd probably get off lightly.

Are you always this stubborn? You've been told several times that you won't get any more money.

Carrying on moaning about it won't change that.

Ha ha like you wouldn't try and get some money if the boot was on the other foot..

We had a good experience with them, signed up for BT Internet, man turned up to install within a week, turns out line had been cut at telephone pole but we’d never had BT so didn’t know. 2 days later cherry picker arrives, fixes line, internet worked. 🤷‍♀️ Better than bloody Virgin who dug up our drive without permission, repaired it badly, left the cable just trailing across the garden into the house, gave us a faulty router which only had a range of 1.5 small rooms and refused to replace it for the life of the contract, I am going to guess they are all a mixed bag.

Been there alot longer than 10 years.

Oh Virgin also failed to turn up collect their router at different 3 arranged times once contract was up and then threatened to charge us for it for keeping it 🤦‍♀️

OK but how long have you lived there?

I don’t know what you’d expect a solicitor to do about it? Are you hoping for some sort of compensation? If you didn’t want it there all these years all you’d have to do was call them and they’d take it off!

You’re being greedy trying to make a fast buck, you’ll get conned one day.

it literally wouldn’t even occur to me, genuinely. we’re not all money grabbers

Yer right?
Like you don't realise people can't just stick things on your property with no permission and access it when they like?

🤦🏾‍♀️ It’s been a while since I came across someone this hard of thinking. Good luck with the solicitor 😄

Op I doubt this is the money spinner you think it is. The very simple reason for this is they will send a bloke along to move it and put it someplace else. Which will cost them less than 200 quid. That’s why the offer is at that level, any more and irs pointless, they may as well just move it.

The only way you’d cash in is if your property was the only place it can go. It is not. They can shove it on the pavement outside. It’s no biggie to them to send one of their dudes along. In fact they can just do it tomorrow. Request access. Move it and get you to fuck off and stop bothering them

“Yer right?
Like you don't realise people can't just stick things on your property with no permission and access it when they like?”

Except they didn’t 🤷‍♀️
They put it on someone else’s property, with their permission I’m sure.
Then years later, you bought the property and weren’t informed about it (not your fault) and didn’t ask about (completely your fault).

Did you think Banksy was working in a different media and left it for you?