Our Developer Services Wastewater team are currently undertaking an initiative which will assist in clearing a backlog of unconcluded legacy sewer adoption, diversion, and abandonment applications.
They are calling on housing developers to attend a workshop in October, allowing them the opportunity to share our initial findings and listen to our approach to ensuring the success of the task. The workshop will also cover suggestion on improving the process and how we can work together more effectively going forward.
There are around 2000 new development sites for us to consider, some of which go back as far as 30 years. We have looked at each individual site to establish what still needs to happen for them to reach a satisfactory conclusion and will share our initial findings and listen to ideas on what we can do collectively to help us work though this backlog at a pace at the workshop.
In addition to the review, we have also been looking at ways in which we can improve the current adoption and diversion procedures to allow for a smoother and quicker journey to avoid future backlogs. We’ve removed the need for SuDS agreements, where we are not being asked to adopt such features.
As you may have experienced, these agreements have proved to be quite challenging to complete and their purpose has been somewhat overtaken by planning requirements, although we will still need a regulatory consent to discharge surface water from a traditional piped system to a SuDS feature or watercourse.
The sewer adoption, diversion and abandonment processes are quite complex and follow many different stages spanning several years.
A simple change in focus or personnel along the journey can easily see the process stall and sites forgotten about. Over time this has added up to a significant number of sites.
As stated earlier, we have around 2000 sites that we need to progress, which cover over 30 years of activity.
Almost two thirds of these are sewer adoptions with the rest being made up of sewer diversion and abandonment agreements. Many of these sites have no formal legal agreements in place, so we will have to think differently about what options are available to progress.
We’ve listened to the feedback we received at our developer conference and know this will help to reduce bond exposure and potentially speed up highway adoptions.
Clearing a backlog would also help to move away from a reactive way of working, allowing us to concentrate on a better customer experience for managing future sewer adoption submissions.
The way we currently manage sewer diversion requests is something that we would like to improve and the timing of signed legal agreements is out of sync with the construction work.
We’ve finished reviewing the status of each site, and know what activities need to be conducted to progress to completion.
The workshop in October is the opportunity to agree next steps and timescales with our housing developers. We cannot compromise on every aspect of the current adoption processes but there are ways we can work together and agree alternative methods.
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