Section 104 drainage: what actually slows an adoption down
Four things hold up an adoption agreement, and three of them are decided before anyone breaks ground. Worth knowing if you are programming a residential site.
We have taken eleven residential drainage packages through to adoption in the last three years. The delays are boringly consistent, so here they are in the order they bite.
The four things
- Design approval submitted late. The water authority works to its own clock and a six to ten week turnaround is normal. Submit at tender stage, not when the trench is open.
- Bond and legal agreement running behind the construction programme. The legal side takes longer than the digging and is nobody’s day job.
- Connection application treated as a formality. A connection to an existing sewer needs its own approval and sometimes its own survey.
- CCTV and air testing left to the end. If a joint fails on a run you backfilled in February, you are digging it up in June.
What we do about it
We survey and test as we go, run by run, and we hold the correspondence with the authority ourselves rather than relaying it through a project manager. It is not clever, it is just earlier.
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