Getting the council to pay up for bodywork damage

[ndreaw]

Hello, has anyone had any success in getting a council to pay up for repairs in a similar situation? My front bumper was damaged due to a dip in the road (subsidence?) rather than a pothole. Due to the location of the damage, it's an expensive bumper-off-in-bodyshop job rather than a £150 SMART repair outside my house.

[GCCP]

I dont think this thread will go well for you.... to me that is one of the "joys" of driving vs damage from a bad road....

the number of times i have scraped my cars due to a dip and maybe a little to much speed is many...

[steveo3002]

no reason it cant be a smart repair if thats what you prefer , only needs jacking up or driving onto a block of wood

prob not worth the stress chasing the council , they rather spend 10k fighting you than pay up

[Byker28i]

We chased our council for about 9 months for damage caused by a deep pothole in the dark. They tried offering 80% but in the end agreed to pay the full amount after we argued we'd chased them for so long, wasn't asking for interest, time off the road etc.

[andburg]

block paved...is it even council adopted?

Cant see the profile of the dip but are you sure you weren't going a little too fast over the hump

[dundarach]

andburg said:

block paved...is it even council adopted?

Cant see the profile of the dip but are you sure you weren't going a little too fast over the hump

That would be my first thought?

I bet it isn't, however you could pay the Council to check for you

And no, I don't think you'll get anything, at least before they tell you to slow down and ask for specs of the car to ensure it's as built and hasn't been modified in any way.

Let it go OP, it's no longer perfect and you'll stop worrying about it now, just like I did recently after finding out that beepers don't work well against heras fencing ooops!

[Ham_and_Jam]

OP, I had much bigger and worse damage than that and had it smart repaired outside my house.

Mine was in the same place, where I scraped a really high kerb on the way out of an underground car park. Took a good chunk out the bottom and side of the bumper.

The guy who came said that obviously he couldn’t take the bumper off, so might be seen if the car was on a ramp.

It was repaired perfectly. No way can you see any evidence of the repair, although I’ve never looked from a ramp and don’t intend to.

[r3g]

I feel your annoyance OP, but if that small incline wrecked your bumper how on earth do you manage to traverse speed humps ? This is just one of the "joys" of running a vehicle with a low front end.

[Greendubber]

Did it happen to anyone else? Presumably lots of folk drive over it without issue, I'd also check if it's actually council as well.

[AdeTuono]

andburg said:

block paved...is it even council adopted?

Cant see the profile of the dip but are you sure you weren't going a little too fast over the hump

Looks to me like it's a speed hump, so paviours would be quite normal. I doubt the entire road will be block-paved.

[Shappers24]

andburg said:

block paved...is it even council adopted?

Cant see the profile of the dip but are you sure you weren't going a little too fast over the hump

Block paving is an approved material for many highway authorities. It also has less embedded carbon than asphalt, which is becoming a factor as we move towards net zero….

[KungFuPanda]

Surely that would be a perfect location for a SMART repair?!?! Just jack the car up, get it masked off and sprayed. Plus it would be more difficult to spot any minor imperfections down there.

[SpidersWeb]

ndreaw said:

Hello, has anyone had any success in getting a council to pay up for repairs in a similar situation? My front bumper was damaged due to a dip in the road (subsidence?) rather than a pothole. Due to the location of the damage, it's an expensive bumper-off-in-bodyshop job rather than a £150 SMART repair outside my house.

How on earth did you manage to scrape the car on that?

The damage is to the nearside of the front, and the dip you point to is in the middle of the road.

Turning left into that junction would have the nearside wheel riding over the road that hadn't subsided and would mean that nothing came in contact with the surface.

I suppose if you were turning right into it and cut the corner so the nearside wheel was going through the dip, but then the difference in height looks less than any speed bump.

[georgeyboy12345]

They make you jump through lots of hoops. They’ll want insurance information from you, they will then contact the insurance co about the claim and your premiums will get inflated for a few years by them.

[RSTurboPaul]

It might be the case that no claims can be made on issues that are not reported (usually on the highway authority's website), the logic being if they don't know about an issue, they can't reasonably be blamed for its condition given the size of the network they look after.


I'm sure that no-one would ever want to check the reported problems map/webpage, report such a problem if it has not been reported already, and then submit a claim some time later from a day they coincidentally happened to be passing along the same route.


EDIT: apostrophes

Edited by RSTurboPaul on Wednesday 10th July 19:18

[sospan]

I live on a road that is completel6 block paved. Council adopted with just a couple of small dips due to ants nests. It was laid when the house was built in 1993 and is in good nick. It is banjo shaped with a central verge of grass and a few trees. The council stopped cutting the grass so we do it ourselves. No big deal and it keeps it tidy.

[sospan]

I live on a road that is completel6 block paved. Council adopted with just a couple of small dips due to ants nests. It was laid when the house was built in 1993 and is in good nick. It is banjo shaped with a central verge of grass and a few trees. The council stopped cutting the grass so we do it ourselves. No big deal and it keeps it tidy.

[98elise]

andburg said:

block paved...is it even council adopted?

Cant see the profile of the dip but are you sure you weren't going a little too fast over the hump

No reason why not. One of out local towns has a block paved high street and its the main A Road.

[Simpo Two]

And of course the block paving is entirely superfluous, there's a normal road underneath. It's just the council wasting money; they did it round here too.

[FMOB]

If they do repair it, the removed blocks will end up in a skip and the repair will use tarmac and look crap forever more.