Refused neighbour BT engineer access

[BearBuggy]

I live in a fairly new estate with one attached neighbour. My land is slightly bigger but a small section has servitude access for both properties. I don’t have an issue with that and left that area accessible when I had my drive way mono blocked.
I however disagree that those rights extend to my actual brickwork of my house. Nothing on my title says it does - only the actual land leading to my property.
When my last neighbour had their internet cables installed they put the box onto my house . Not even near the servitude area but near my front door. New neighbours are having BT installed but for some reason can’t use previous box (already on my house) so they came yesterday to fit new one. I have no issue with them doing the cables on my drive but stopped them when I realised they were adding another box into my bricks. My neighbour wall is literally 15 cm away but they’ve had some sort of rough casting or something that makes it more difficult.
I didn’t say anything with last neighbours as it was already done. But now I have my own virgin box, gas meter, their house old box (which bt won’t remove) another box I’ve no idea what’s for and now this. It’s becoming too much and the front of my house is starting to look terrible whilst they have nothing apart from gas.

I have told them they need to put box into neighbours brick but of course they couldn’t do that as that wasn’t on the job sheet! Feel bad they’ve no internet and maybe I was unreasonable. The last neighbour box was BT as well - didn’t make that clear

Of course you're stating your opinion, as we're all entitled to do.

In my opinion, telling someone to b off in a public forum is rather abusive and argumentative.

@IHateWinter2024 of course someone with a mortgage owns their home.
Within the law they can do what they like to it.

The lender can, however, in extrémis force the borrower to sell as it’s a secured loan against the value of the house.

I’ve seen much worse on here tbh. Much worse…

I'm sure you have.

I don’t think you are being unreasonable at all. No way would I have the neighbours box on my house. The mortgage argument is neither here nor there, I have a small mortgage outstanding but I probably own 90% of my house and both myself and the bank don’t want anyone else interfering with property we own. I would absolutely refuse permission (and assume I’m working in the best interest of myself and the other property owners i.e the bank).

You’re so wrong. It may be ‘as far as you’re concerned’, but it’s not the legal position.

I'd have let them fit the box. 🤷‍♀️

They can fit the box on their own property. It's not your problem. The end.

Openreach have certain legal rights going back to when they were Post Office Telephones, they can obtain a legal wayleave obliging you to have their equipment on your property to serve another, and only certain wayleaves attract a payment.

The equipment belongs to Openreach and it is an offence under the Telecommunications act of 1984 to tamper with it or to obstruct an engineer installing or working on equipment from doing so.

The legal position is the person taking the mortgage has the property legally in their name, the bank has a first order charge on the title - this DOES NOT mean they own it, it means they have secured interest in it, and if the repayments are not met they can go to court to order a sale.

They would never own it even then, only get their money back via the sale.

You are mistaken about ownership of the house.

@Education79 why would they go to the hassle of a wayleave when the box could easily be put onto neighbouring house? Seems extreme.

I would have said no as well. Especially if there's no technical reason why it can't be attached to their place!

When I had fibre to home added to ours the guy whom came out to add the line was very accommodating, asked if I had a preference where on the property it came down/anywhere different to the last line - as it was now internet only no phone lines they installed it to the basement for us.

Technically BT own all of the line upto the consumer socket in your house, so if you mess with any of they can have something to say about it. However I've personally pulled out all the virgin cables and taken down the sky dish the previous owners had and put it all in the bin. I was pretty confident that they wouldn't notice and paid off.

I bet the order for installing the line is explicit - attach to property #31 etc. They have discretion on how best to install it on the property, but it must be the property described on the work order.

<slow clap> not your house. burn!

It's bizarre they think you'd accept this. It's almost like when someone dumps one bit of garbage, it attracts others who take it that's it's now an unofficial rubbish heap.
They've done the same to your front wall, like oh, there's so many boxes here already this must just be the municipal box-wall. And the owner must absolutely love boxes. Probably requests them purely for the aesthetic value...🙄
Sorry, not very helpful I know. But I can totally see your frustration so trying to lighten the mood a bit.

I echo that. Since I moved at the end of May I have had no end of hassle with them. Despite telling them umpteen times ,by phone and letter, that I have moved, giving them my new address and being reassured that they have it, they have persisted in sending things to my old address. In the end they apologised and said I would receive a refund by cheque. Guess what? It was sent to my old address!

@BearBuggy Just so I can get a clearer picture of this in my head, the cable comes from the road in his little trunk, under your garden/drive/access area, pops up out of the ground by the front (?) wall of your house, in to his box - then where does he go from there? Is it a semi-detached with the cable coming in to your property then through the party wall in to theirs?

I did installations for a national phone/internet provider for 18 months and it's a shit job let me tell you. You get shafted on the contract and on the price, if you don't work like the devil you can end up where you have to pay them for letting you do it instead of them paying you. When the work looks rough or the connections shit, that's because they won't pay us for the extra 15 mins to do a beautiful job, when they want 8 or 10 installs a day you can't give up that much time for free.

That's also why we're so anal about work orders - they won't pay for anything at all which isn't on the job sheet, and if I use any cable or fittings not listed on there they charge me full retail price for it, not wholesale.

Also jointing/extending external cables really isn't the 5 minute job it looks like. Underground cables have to be permanent and maintenance free, any joints have to be IP67/68 rated, the same standard as permanent in water connections or permanent seabed connections respectively. It's a long winded job and the fittings are properly expensive, plus the joints are really big si they'd have to dig up half your driveway to get enough slack to fit and burry the jb. If you've got FTP/ fibre optic right to your front door, that's even more expensive cos yes need a bloke from NASA to make the joint and the finished pot is the size of a two litre bottle of pop.

There's a lot of things that made us look like arseholes - and sometimes we can be, it's no easy to smile when you hear your 16th "well why can't you just..." from a customer this week and it's only fucking Tuesday - things that make us look bad when really we're just taking all the fallout from where the powers that be want to charge you lot the Earth but pay us with mud... Sorry!

You are quite wrong. If you have a mortgage, and most have for many years, as long as you don't default, the property is YOURS. Even if you've only had it a year. I don't know where you got the idea that it isn't. Have a look at your mortgage details and you will see.

Just because you don't care if other people's utility boxes were attached to the exterior of your house, doesn't mean that people who don't like it are wrong.

Not just for the look of it, but the sheer audacity of a utility provider attaching someone else's service box to MY property would result in immediate removal by rhe company or by me. The company would either repair or compensate for the damage as well.

Too many times people just roll over and accept these things. Well, not me. Not after the neighbors' fence installers cut through our electrical cable and nearly burned our house down.

The drama is all yours.

It's MY name on the mortgage, mine on the deeds. The BANK'S name is on the lien attached to the mortgage only until I've paid it off.

In the meantime, I am responsible for the insurance, taxes, maintence and upkeep of MY house.

Your opinion that she doesn't own her house and land doesn't hold water. None of us are keyboard warriors (look in the mirror for that) and we aren't arguing with you We're just stymied by your opinions and have all been trying to explain the law and why that makes your statements incorrect.

“As far as you’re concerned” is irrelevant as that’s simply not how the law works. No one cares about your misguided opinions on the matter, they care about the facts. None of which you seem to have the faintest idea about. How utterly embarrassing for you. Keyboard warrior indeed.

In future if you’re going to try and provoke people with your self entitled idiotic ramblings, expect people to fire back at you because the majority of people on Mumsnet aren’t fools and won’t put up with your rude and arrogant behaviour.

I’m not surprised you’re annoyed, that’s infuriating! And I feel sorry for your poor neighbour too who needs their internet. But the company is at fault - I hate this ‘well we got the paperwork wrong but now it’s law’ attitude they seem to have - they should fit it on the correct house regardless of whether it’s a bit more difficult to do :(