I went to the neighbourhood wall meeting. It was nice to see so many neighbours and it was interesting, but ultimately a waste of time I think. Learned some interesting stuff about the history of the problem and generally about the estate. The original wall was guaranteed for sixty years, the one that has fallen down now, in less than eighteen years. Everyone involved has gone bust and even the council have no records of who signed this off, it's all very fishy. Everyone seems to have been negligible and yet untouchable. We might be able to sue people at some point but the sense in the room was "get this wall replaced now before the costs go up". HOWEVER I think there were a dozen noisy "let's pay it now" types throughout the room, and all the "not paying that" people were mumbling quietly, but probably in a majority. Seemingly if just one house out of the hundred doesn't agree with it then it's not going ahead, but we all still have to pay for it. Something like that. It won't get started until everyone agrees and all the money is in, but the costs will keep going up. Sounds like some are definitely not going to pay, so what then? It sounds like the first step is an invoice to each house, and then interested added to the invoice, and then ultimately a charge on the property. So as long as I don't want to sell any time soon it will be fine...
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in Hythe near Folkestone. Wed + dad to two, I am a full stack web engineer, + I do js / nodejs, some ruby, python, php etc. I like pubbing, parkrun, eating, home automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, tree stuff, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.