House I am buying is on combined sewer

[Pramodn]

I am in advance stage of buying a house and search revealed that combined sewer servicing adjoining two houses runs below the rear extension (mine is end of the row house). Current seller bought the house in 2012 with rear extension, and he has no knowledge of build over agreement. My solicitor has not been of much help in advising me on how to proceed. I am very confused on should I proceed with CCTV survey and indemnity or pull out. Any help is greatly appreciated. Also any recommendation of legal expert who can provide hourly advice on this please?

In a previous house, mains drainage ran under our conservatory! We knew nothing about this until the road came up for adoption and some finishing works were being done to the road. The water company chose to redirect the main down a track away from our house. We paid nothing.

I'd probably choose to go for the indemnity as these things aren't generally expensive, but what I'm saying is it would be unlikely to be your liability anyway based on my experience!

@Bamboozled5 thanks for sharing the view. very helpful.

Ok was just trying to be helpful as I was unsure from your initial description. If you’d actually had a mains in your back garden which is possible you’d still have had a short run of pipe from each house going into it and some people wouldn’t know the difference. And it can (or could) make a difference to how interested the water company are in fixing it and whether they’d reroute it or not.

in your position I’d probably take the indemnity out for peace of mind. But you could ring the water company up and ask them who owns the pipe/who is responsible for repairs. As long as you have the address they should be able to tell you, they will have an online mapping system so should be able to tell you there and then from the call centre. It might be they reassure you enough that you don’t need the indemnity

The danger in doing this is that alerting them to building work done without a build over agreeement, would invalidate any indemnity policy.

The drainage plan the OP will receive as part of her searches, should show this information anyway.

We have this on our extension. We bought indemnity. I have spoken to a couple companies and basically if it needed replacing they would line the old pipe anyways instead of having to dig down. We have a man hole each side of the extension.

You don’t have to tell them about the extension, just ask who owns the sewer? Don’t think that would trigger anything? 🤷‍♀️

Maybe so, but there is no need anyway as this is exactly what is shown in the drainage searches.

We had this when we sold our property, our garage must have been built over sewers prior to us buying. Nothing came up when we bought. We paid for indemnity policy for the buyer. Seemed to satisfy them.

I had a shared drain with my favourite house and next door built an extension over it that I was worried about. But it was fine. My house was older though and it had strong and deep Victorian designed drains.

Once when it was blocked the water company came out to unblock it as it was their responsibility.

Be clear about what the indemnity covers, what the risks are, what impact these risks might have and where the responsibility might lie. There is a reason why drains are included in the conveyancing process but equally, the water and waste companies do take quite a lot of responsibility.

Worst case scenario... extension needing to be dug up to access manhole / broken drain.. but the reality is that the drain would most likely be diverted.

Indemnity often covers less than you think in terms of how long the building has been in place, what costs would be covered and under what circumstances.

Those posters who have worked for water companies or have had drainage issues paid for by water companies have been reassuring... take comfort from that.

On the other hand, it is irrelevant that there have been no issues thus far.. drains are more risky as they age, not less so.