buying house - is this a big deal?

[ginghamstarfish]

I'm panicking re house purchase! We are renting as previous purchase fell through. Rental contract ends early July, no chance to extend as landlord wants to move in. We are buying, hoping to exchange end June, but there is a sticking point - we cannot find out where surface water drains to. Searches say only that property does not pay for surface water drainage, meaning it does not go to public sewer system. Planning application - dev of 7 houses built about 3 years ago - says only that some will have soakaway, but some will connect to public drains.
Sellers say they 'believe' it goes to a soakaway on their land - would have to be the small front garden as the back garden slopes up from the house. Across the road is another property so surely cannot go to there. As the seller is not arsed to do anything to prove this, we have emailed the builders and will call them Monday, we will call the planning department and ask them also. Other alternative is to ask sellers to pay for a drainage survey to find out what is going on. If we cannot get an answer is this a big deal?

If it is on their land, it will have a manhole or drain cover clearly visible. A shared soakaway is very unusual, because who would pay for maintenance or clearing ( kaki sucker)

I once had a house with a soak away on a higher level, it had a pump, but I don’t think anyone could ‘not know’ about that.

But if it is only surface water, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. You can always do an extra drain when you own the house, we installed one under a sloping drive here, it cost about £1k.

@Allthegoodnamesarechosen thanks, yes we did not specifically notice that. The foul water drainage goes to the public sewer system though, could a drain cover on the property not be for that?

Can you pay for a CCTV survey?

Depends how motivated they are to sell. I wouldn't pay for a survey for buyers if there had been no pluvial flooding at the property whilst I had lived there and would think you were being overly precious. If you are that worried then get an Indemnity policy.

Often surface water is held in ‘crates’ underground and soaks away. As the development is not very old you can check the plans on the councils planning portals, you can do that today

Yes, it should still be on the councils plan thankfully due to how new the houses are

Our new build estate drains surface water into a soak away. We don't have individual ones per property. We haven't had a problem in 20 years and it's great because our water bills are reduced. I've never considered it to be a problem and thought it was typical now.

Thanks all, will call the council tomorrow to see if they can shed more light.

Surface water soak away is a total non-issue. In fact you'll get lower water charge, so you might even see it as a benefit.

If the current owners don't know where it is, and with the recent run of dry, hot weather, you can assume it's the bit of the garden that is still green and lush.

I would want to at least know where it is.
I knew someone who had a house with a shared soak away on a farmers land. Years later there was an issue with it. They don't know what was causing the problem and they had to wait for access because crops were in the field... or pay damages to the farmer

Yes, we do want to know for sure, and it is odd that it does not seem to be on record anywhere. Just waiting for the planning department to call me back.

If you go on the council website you can look up the original planning application which should have details of proposed drainage. If it was built 3 years ago the application would have been before this. You need to find the proposed drainage layout or surface water drainage scheme, Suds scheme or similar (the name varies) to find what should be there. It will likely include permeable paving on driveways and should show the location of soakaway connected to each house. Sometimes it's within the flood risk assessment (FRA), sometimes it's separate.

When we bought our house, we paid for a cctv study of the drains of the house we wanted to buy. Hope you get an answer!

Thanks all, I have resolved the issue. Having looked at all the available planning docs and not found anything other than 'proposed' soakaway in the original planning application, I called the planning department and building control who sent me a later drainage report for the development. Turns out 4 of the 7 have soakaways, but the other 3 including the one we are buying have attenuation crates under the driveways, with some discharge to mains sewer. Have never heard of this before but the building control man said it is not a thing requiring maintenance etc.

We have a soakaway that is uphill from the house, the builder had to dig a huge hole and a downward sloping drain to it. I t was filled with gravel I think, no manhole cover just buried once completed.