MILES of forgotten roads have been left in disrepair and plagued with potholes as Oxfordshire County Council battles with a backlog of unadopted highways.

It means homeowners are paying to fill their own potholes, lay their own paving and tackle people parking in front of their homes, or else are left trying to persuade the developers to do the work.

Residents of Minchery Farm Cottages in Littlemore, below, say their road is a nightmare and they are powerless to stop people parking anywhere they want. And people in Witney’s Madley Park estate say their road has never brought them up to the agreed standard.

Oxford Mail:

  • Minchery Farm Cottage residents Sally Coble, Neil Scott and Tony Thomas inspect potholes in their street

THEY say if you want something doing, do it yourself.

And that is exactly what those living in Minchery Farm Cottages, Littlemore, have done.

Oxfordshire County Council, the highways authority responsible for looking after and controlling county roads, has never taken ownership of the road.

Neil Scott’s wife Linda is a paramedic, and he revealed that on occasions she has been unable to get out of the road to get to an emergency because cars blocked the way.

Mr Scott, 55, said: “It is a nightmare. There have been times when she’s blocked in, but the council doesn’t think we have a right to moan.”

And it is more than just parking problems – there are no streetlights on the road, and residents have to pay to fill their own potholes and lay their own paving.

Mr Scott, a van driver for Tesco, said: “I couldn’t even estimate how much I’ve spent on filling potholes over the 19 years we’ve lived here.”

The six homes were built by the Thames Water Board for employees at their Littlemore plant and the county has never adopted the road.

Tony Thomas, 71, has lived there since he worked for the water board in 1972, and said: “The road is in a terrible state, there’s no doubt about it.

“It needs something done because it’s getting worse and worse.”

Sally Coble also buys her own asphalt to fill potholes and has paid for paving in front of her house.

She said: “The surface was unsafe, it was cracked and it was a trip hazard.

“There’s no street lighting, so if you come along here in the dark you could trip and hurt yourself and I wouldn’t want that to happen to my visitors or anyone.”

The council is currently in the process of adopting 14 sections of road in Oxford, including Sandhills Primary School, Headington, and Jericho Health Centre – but not Minchery Farm Cottages.

County spokesman Dominic Llewellyn-Jones said the council was “unlikely” to adopt the road due to the narrowness of the street leading to it, the “significant cost” as well as the requirement for a turning space for bin trucks.

If it ever was adopted, he said, residents would have to pay for the work involved.

Oxford City Councillor John Tanner, who also sits on the county council, said: “I’m sure the people in Minchery Farm Cottages would prefer it if the county kept up the road but it’s not going to happen.

“Given the county council’s financial situation it isn’t going to be keen to take on the extra financial responsibility.”

What are unadopted roads?

OXFORDSHIRE County Council is the highways authority, meaning it is responsible for keeping roads in a usable, safe condition; maintaining street lighting and managing foliage.

When developers build new roads as part of estates, they sign legal agreements with the council on the standard to which they will build the roads in order for the council to adopt them.

Adoption of a road does not mean the council owns the land beneath the road, but the council as highways authority is responsible for the maintenance of it and cannot permit private individuals or companies to maintain the highway.

Oxfordshire County Council has said it is employing more staff to cope with the backlog as it adopts 210 new roads, many in estates completed years ago, others at schools, business parks and a health centre.

As well as new roads, there are also stretches where there is simply no existing record of ownership at any time.

Oxford Mail:

  • Madley Park Resident’’ Association chairman David Bates, right, with committee member Tony Bennett

RESIDENTS on Witney’s Madley Park estate have been unclear who to ask to fill their potholes and mend their streetlights for years.

The first homes were built by Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon Homes in 2000.

Residents’ association chairman David Bates said: “A streetlight goes out, you ask the council to repair it and it says ‘sorry that road is unadopted’.

“That is often how you find out it’s not adopted.”

The estate is just one of hundreds across Oxfordshire where the county council – the highways authority – has taken years to take responsibility for new roads.

The council said the quality of housing developments, developers going insolvent and failure to sign legal agreements before work starts all contributed to the problem.

County council spokesman Dominic Llewellyn-Jones said the authority was now recruiting new staff to deal with the problem.

He said: “The county council takes road adoption very seriously and works with developers to ensure that adoption does take place as quickly as possible.

“The council is keen to resolve these issues and is in the process of recruiting staff to deal with the backlog.”

But for residents, the delays are unacceptable.

Mr Bates said: “I find it absolutely amazing that 15 years on there are still ongoing discussions between the developers and the council.

“We have pressed for this for years and we keep getting told ‘we’re almost there’.”

He said the roads the council had adopted were the main roads through the estate used by buses, adding: “That’s presumably because the bus companies said they wouldn’t use the roads that aren’t.”

West Oxfordshire District Councillor for Witney Andrew Coles called the delay unacceptable.

Oxfordshire County Council told the Oxford Mail it was in the process of adopting 210 roads across the county.

Of the 22 named in Witney, 11 of them are in Madley Park.

All three developers of Madley Park – Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon and Charles Church – refused to say anything to the Oxford Mail on the subject.

The county council is also in the process of adopting 28 roads in Carterton, 16 in Bicester and 13 in Abingdon.

The man who founded Abingdon’s Fairacres retail park said he purposefully never asked the county to adopt the roads there because he did not want them to end up like all the roads around.

John May, now a shareholder in Mays Properties, said: “If they were under county control we’d now have potholes and the roads would be in a terrible state.”

ONCE every 18 months, the residents of Poplar Road, Botley, go out together and fill in their potholes.

Their street is unadopted by Oxfordshire County Council, meaning the council has no responsibility for it, so homeowners look after it instead.

Last June, 17 homeowners from the 30-house street got out their wheelbarrows and spades and set to work.

Sand and gravel aggregate is poured into the holes and residents even rent a roller to flatten it out – a total cost of about £1,000 a time.

Compared to the six-figure sum it would cost to resurface the whole street, the residents have always said it is a drop in the ocean.

John McKay, 50, a porter at Exeter College, said community ownership brought the street together.

Residents also buy their own grit bins, but Vale of White Horse District Council collects the rubbish.

The street holds fundraising events throughout the year to pay for the works: a street party, a plant sale and barbecue.

Each house also contributes £25 a year towards the cost of public-liability insurance.

So the system works well until something major goes wrong, like a burst sewer pipe.

For that reason alone – the difficulty of digging up the entire road to search for a fault in the sewers – Mr McKay has said he would not recommend the scheme.

When the residents attempted to get Oxfordshire County Council to adopt the road some years ago, the council declined the offer, saying the road would need work on it to bring it up to county standard.

Oxford Mail:

  • Grove county councillor Jenny Hannaby

THE MAIN entrance road into a 2,500-home estate had to be moved 70m to the south because no-one could work out who owned the road originally earmarked.

Grove Parish Council had specifically chosen the original entrance site for the estate on the village’s old airfield because it would help link the new development with existing ones.

But the developers behind the estate – Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon – had to submit a new planning application after Oxfordshire County Council said it could not establish who owned the part of Newlands Drive proposed for the new entrance.

The council said the problem dated back to the re-drawing of local government boundaries in 1974 when Grove moved from Berkshire into Oxfordshire. The owner-less road is one of countless examples in the county.

When the Oxford Mail asked the county council to tell us under the Freedom of Information Act the total number of unadopted roads in the county, the council refused, saying it would take one officer working full time for 14 weeks (500 hours) to give us the full list.

County councillor for Grove Jenny Hannaby said there were “plenty” of roads in her ward that were never adopted historically, but said the real concern was roads due to be built with 5,500 new homes in Wantage and Grove in the next 15 years.

She said: “These huge developments coming up will be built piecemeal by developers and each one could fail to bring the roads up to adoption standard.

“It is not good enough. We have to find enforcement with planning rules strong enough to make these builders comply to the standards required.”