Our neighbours have built an extension, the wall of which is set back 25cm from our boundary line. The extension borders part of our driveway and part of our garden. The border used to be marked by our neighbours fence, which they removed at the start of the building work.
The front of the extension is by our driveway gates, which used to be joined to by our neighbours driveway gates before they removed them for the building.
The extension has now left a 25cm gap at the front between our gate and the new wall and at the back between the original fence and the new wall. There is therefore a gap from the road into our garden and from our garden into the neighbours garden.
There is also a trench filled with concrete, mortar and wooden boards (which are effectively concreted in and stick up above ground level) together with parts of bricks and other builders rubbish. This trench runs along the border beside the wall, technically it is mostly on their side of the boundary but it is not separated from our drive and garden at all - which is quite dangerous when our children’s toys go into it and they retrieve them.
Before the build started, we asked the neighbours what would happen about the gaps and they told us they would block them (we have this in writing). However, we have tried contacting them again to ask when and how this would happen and they are refusing to respond.
This is extremely stressful and we have had to temporarily block the gaps ourselves otherwise anyone could come into our garden. Not to mention how awful it is to have builders looking into the house and garden and all the noise, mess and dust of building during lockdown when we are trying to work from home and homeschool and we can’t even enjoy our garden. They have even been working on bank holidays...
Anyway- my questions are: Do the neighbours have to do anything to make good/safe the trench and block the gaps? Or do we now have to pay to fix the damage they have caused?
I will try and do a diagram...