TL:DR

A developer has abandoned a massive unstabilised excavation on a steep hillside above a public road and family homes in Ramsbottom. The ground is actively collapsing. Sewage is flowing onto the road. Families are frightened. The developer has gone silent. The authorities won’t help. More than six months have passed since the Stop Work Order was put in place and nothing has been done. We need your help to make our street safe.

The details

Imagine looking out of your front window every single day at a massive unstabilised hole in the hillside directly opposite your home. Imagine watching it get bigger, watching the ground crack and crumble, watching material creep closer to the road your children walk along. Imagine feeling frightened every time it rains.

That is the reality for families living on Tanners Street and Carr Street in Ramsbottom right now.

Since October 2025 a developer has left a deep, dangerous, completely unstabilised excavation carved into a steep hillside directly above a public road and family homes. More than six months later nothing has been done. The hole is getting bigger. The ground is actively moving. 

This isn’t a planning dispute. This isn’t a neighbourhood squabble. This is families lying awake at night wondering if their homes are safe. It’s happening to ordinary people. People who raised these concerns from the start. It has been reported to every agency possible - Bury Council, the Health and Safety Executive, and the Environment Agency, to name a few - and each one says they can’t give us an answer. Even our local Councillor and MP can’t get an answer out of them. 

Here is what is happening on our street right now:

The hillside is actively collapsing. The edge of the excavation is visibly crumbling and the ground structure is beginning to fail. The garden of the family living above the excavation has already partially fallen into the hole. 

A drain has been blocked, so sewage contaminated water is flowing from the site directly onto the public road. 

Debris is already on the road surface. Families live metres away on all sides, directly in the path of any landslip, separated from this unstable hillside by nothing more than a single lane road.

The Health and Safety Executive served a prohibition notice on the developer in October 2025. Work stopped and the developer was aggressive with everyone who visited the site, before going completely silent, and stopped responding to everyone — the council, the Health and Safety Executive, United Utilities, residents. Everyone.

HSE have now told our MP, Mr. James Frith, that their powers are exhausted because there are no longer workers on site. So the site just sits there crumbling. Getting more dangerous every week.

Our councillor Gareth Staples-Jones has worked hard on our behalf and we are grateful. But he cannot do this alone. The Council needs to act using the emergency powers available to them. Our MP James Frith needs to push harder. The Greater Manchester Mayor needs to know this is happening on his patch.

We are not asking for anything unreasonable. We are asking to feel safe in our own homes. We are asking for the authorities who are supposed to protect us to actually do so. We are asking for a dangerous situation that should never have been allowed to develop to be urgently resolved.

Please sign this petition and share it with everyone you know in Ramsbottom and beyond. Every signature tells the people in power that this community will not be ignored.

We are calling on Bury MBC, James Frith MP and Mayor Andy Burnham to:

• Immediately commission an independent geotechnical risk assessment of the threat to the public road and neighbouring properties
• Use emergency powers under Section 78 of the Building Act 1984 to carry out stabilisation works and recover every penny of the cost from the developer
• Use powers under the Highways Act 1980 to protect the public road immediately
• Coordinate urgently with United Utilities to fix the drain and stop the waste water flowing into the street
• Provide residents with regular clear updates on every action being taken
• Hold the developer fully accountable for the cost of putting this right

Our street deserves to be safe. Our families deserve to feel secure in their own homes. Please help us make that happen.

 Before

(Img courtesy of Google Maps)

After