Is drain public or private?

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Leeds
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I'm adding an en-suite to a first floor bedroom and the new soil pipe will need to connect into the existing drain on my property. I've contact the water company to find out if the drain running down my driveway is private or public, they told me they had no records of the drains other than those on the public road before my driveway.

They have suggested getting a drainage contractor in to do a survey and tell me if it's public or private.

Is this right, would the water company have a record of the drain if they were public or recently adopted by them?

The map I've seen for their sewers shows a public drain running down the public road to the bottom of our cul de sac, then taking a sharp right turn and continuing down the hill under the next door neighbours garden. There are no further drains marked on the map showing how each property is served.

If it's a public drain then the water company will want me to pay them a small fortune to make an application to connect into it, yet they can't tell me if it's theirs or not, doesn't seem right! So I'd have to pay a contractor to tell me if it's public or private. At this rate it will cost me several hundred quid in paperwork just to add a toilet and basin in a new en-suite.
 
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Water company drain records are notoriously inaccurate and cannot be relied upon anyway. Furthermore only shared drains used to be marked on their system and when the water companies adopted a lot of (what were private) drains a few years back and they became shared these were never added to the system. The water company's could survey them all but our water bills would have to go up to pay for it.

To determine if the drain is shared or private you just need to establish if the drain serves only your house or anyone else's house too. If it is only yours it is private, if it includes anyone else's too it is shared. if it's not obvious by lifting the manholes and considering the pipe routes etc you should be able to work it out by getting your neighbour to flush their loo/run their taps etc whilst someone looks down the manholes. A bit of savvy common sense is generally all that is required.
 
Appreciate the reply thanks.

Are you saying that if the drain is shared with a neighbour it's classed as public? On the citizens advice website it says that "If you have a private or unadopted sewer, and own a property, you are responsible for the cost of maintaining and repairing it. If the sewer serves a number of properties, all the owners are jointly responsible for these costs."

That implies it can still be shared and private.

Best we can see from lifting the 2 manhole covers is that the rain water and soil pipes from our house run into a manhole on our drive, which the runs to a 2nd manhole further along our drive where our neighbour's drain connects in. From there it runs away down the hill under our garden and likely into the other neighbour's garden where the public sewer marked on their map runs. So the bits around my house start at my house, join with the neighbours waste from their house then connect back into the marked public sewer which runs under the other neighbours garden.
 
You dont need to know ownership if you are connecting to your existing drainage - ie the bit of pipe that comes to your house only.

Any other bits of drain that have connection from neighbours are public drains owned by the water company. But the bits of pipe from any such drain is yours once it leaves your house up to the first connection of a neighbours drain. Its not difficult to work out without CCTV.
 
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It looks like the drain branch along the side of the house is private and you can connect without needing permission. The drain run at the rear appears to continue into next door so is probably shared/public but as you are not connecting to that drain its not a problem. Bit of a pain though if you ever want a rear extension.
 
Great thanks all, it does seem to tie up to a document I've now found on one of the water company sites with examples of ownership of drains.
 

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