THERE can be few councillors in Scotland whose casework does not include pleas from residents that the roads they live on be maintained by councils ("Thousands of homes in legal limbo as streets stay private", The Herald, July 15). In the past when money was flush councils such as Fife had a budget for fixing unadopted roads, but with the year-on-year requirement to find “savings” on revenue budgets, anything not statutorily required faced the chop. Fife Council has recently reinstated a small budget for repairing unadopted roads, but given the legacy defects that now exist, this is a drop in the ocean.
As one officer pointed out to me, buyers of new houses should be aware that they are buying a house on an unadopted road and that this would generally reduce the price, compared to a house on a road the developer had spent more money on bringing up to the required standard for adoption.
That argument, however, is of little consolation to the many residents in north-east Fife who have bought old houses on unadopted roads, which have been in existence for many decades and which the council used to maintain.
An obvious solution to prevent creating whole estates of unadopted roads in the future is for the Scottish Government to require developers to build roads to an adoptable standard as a statutory condition for planning approval. Such a requirement should be non-negotiable, as developers invariably seek to minimise costs on infrastructure in order to maximise profits.
Linda Holt (Conservative, Councillor East Neuk & Landward), Anstruther.
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