What do you do when you answer the door still dripping wet from the shower you had to dash from when a Sun journalist wants to interview you? You take fifteen minutes to pull yourself together for the interview. You tell them everything they need to know to understand that your land has been taken unlawfully. You cross your arms when you’re told to and you look at the camera uncomfortably because the whole thing is surreal and bizarre that it’s even happening in the first place. You did nothing wrong to be in this horrific predicament, so you’ll do anything to bring attention to it to warn everyone. Even if that means touching heads with your husband, holding up the weird death threat you got in the mail. So that’s what I did. I’m living in my own surreal mockumentary, which you can read about by clicking here.

Unfortunately, the article did not delve into the local government's negligence that I am fighting, which is the biggest problem—a problem that has significant public interest. If the council can adopt my drive, it can adopt yours, too. I’ve created this petition to bring awareness to the archaic legislation that was used to adopt my drive: Section 288(7) of the Highways Act. This legislation is entirely outdated especially if it fails to be used for the purpose Parliament created it, which intended to bring poor areas up to sanitation standards like the small courtyard slums of the Victorian era London. 

Section 228(7) of the Highways Act allows any land that is laid out as a way, lane, road, highway, bridleway, or footpath to be adopted. It doesn’t specify what any of these terms mean legally (for example, there’s no legal definition of a highway), so some numpty can arbitrarily include a drive in this definition for road adoption. There is no mention of public use in s.228(7), therefore local councils can implement this piece of legislation regardless if the public use the way or lane or my front garden or not.

The Sun article mentions a land dispute between my neighbour and I will comment on that briefly. They sued me for a small coffin-sized piece of land that was on my side of the fencing. My neighbour erected a prefab shed illegally in 2012, against the conditions of their property. They use our drive (unlawfully until it was recently adopted) and a portion of the kerb and verge to gain entry to part of their shed. To do this, they opened gates (recently removed) over our drive and lift their up-and-over door to their shed. There is no dropped kerb to this shed. Basically, my next-door neighbour wants to use their drive and my drive.

To use my drive, the neighbours believed they had highway access to their shed (the council added our road to the list of streets in 2002), and when they found out the council’s (disputed) highway did not extend to the shed, they then claimed the little piece of land between the drive and the shed was theirs.  When we moved out to have our house entirely re-plumbed and rewired, we placed two trough planters on the strip of land, so the neighbours could not interfere with builders trying to gain access to our house. I had sought clarification on the boundary fencing from the council before I did this. A few moths later, the neighbours sued us for trespass. We hired a boundary expert for a survey who believed the fencing was boundary. They used previous neighbours as a witness who retrospectively thought the boundary was the kerb (both witnesses claim they never discussed boundaries when they lived here, nor did they sell their houses with this claim). The judge favoured their witness over our boundary expert. We lost the case. The judge decided the boundary that splits the properties to be the kerbing (of my drive), and not fencing. I should state that the first judge and the appeal judge ignored the condition on the neighbours’ property, which required their rear garden to be enclosed by “party-lined fencing”. Party-lined fencing means boundary fencing. I.e., the fencing was the boundary and not the kerb, according to the developers. But what do they know, right?

I will be the first one to admit this land boundary dispute makes both homeowners look really bad.  Like children, someone said, and I mostly agree. When you slide the landownership aspect away, you get the public issue: public money has been used to adopt a drive not to serve the public but to benefit one person.  So that's £20,000 plus invested in adopting the road.  That's not including the maintenance cost, all of which could be going to better projects that serve the public.  The residents of the road want restricted parking, so more tax money going into the cul-de-sac.  The residents want the cul-de-sac to be maintained with public money, but they want to take away parking, the only public benefit the cul-de-sac has, which isn't even an issue. I've never seen a resident unable to find parking. 

Anyway, let’s go back to how the council was involved in my boundary dispute. Not only did the CYC supply the neighbours with incorrect highway adoption records they used to sue us, but when the council realised the road, or our drive (like our land charge said), was not adopted, they used s.228(7) to adopt our drive five days before the boundary dispute hearing. The neighbours did not have a case if they couldn’t legally get to the disputed strip of land. The CYC wrote a letter to the nine residents inviting them to have Government House Road adopted using only s.228(7). Not a Section 38, which is typical. Section 228(7) is the only piece of legislation the council knew they could adopt our drive without our permission or ability to oppose without a JR. It seems like the City of York Council is investing public money to cover up their epic mistake. 

The City of York Council is not off the hook. I’ve learned recently that they are being investigated by the auditors for the public money invested in the unlawful adoption of Government House Road (I say unlawful despite the JR outcome because there is evidence the council did not follow their powers of delegation policy to involve councillors in the decision, and the council did not reveal the true condition of Government House Road during JR proceedings). There also is an ongoing investigation with the ICO because the CYC has not shared required public records concerning Government House Road. There are so many more shameful things to list, but they’ll come out eventually. I’m really hoping for this Sun article to get in the hands of someone who wants to highlight mind-boggling council failures and extravagant misuse of power. Email me if that’s you: coyotes_sugars0c@icloud.com.

There are 100 private roads in my city. Quite a few of those are through roads the public use and therefore contribute to their deterioration.  Some of those roads have been waiting to be adopted since 2016, but my cul-de-sac of nine residents gets an invitation for adoption, skipping right past those roads that've been waiting. Roads that have a public benefit.