Openreach Build Fibre Pole in Private Garden Without Permission

Openreach (BT) has apologised after their UK engineers, who were busy building a new “ultra fast” Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network in Clackmannanshire (Scotland), installed a 27ft tall telegraph pole in a private garden without permission, and while the owners were out visiting a dying family member.

Telegraph poles are perhaps one of the least loved pieces of modern broadband and phone infrastructure, particularly when they’re erected in locations where none have previously been present. Nevertheless, they are also a fairly cost-effective solution for deploying, or upgrading, a network in an area where the cost of going underground would be too high.

Such poles are usually deployed under Permitted Development (PD) rights, which means that they don’t have to go through the usual planning permissions process and can pop up quite quickly, often without residents getting much of a say in the matter. But any deployment on private land does tend to require prior permission via a legal wayleave agreement.

At this point it’s worth saying that, for all the complaints from those who don’t like them, you can often find plenty of people who would be more than happy to accept the deployment of new poles if it meant gaining access to a full fibre network. In this case the owners of a home in the rural Clackmannanshire town of Alva have no objection to the rollout itself, just where Openreach put one of their poles – slap bang in their private garden.

According to the Daily Record, Mr and Mrs Brown, who received no forewarning of the development, left one morning to visit a dying family member in hospital and returned later to find a new telegraph pole in their garden and obstructing the view from their window.

Mr Brown (61) said:

“We left late morning and there was nothing there and when we got back at tea time there was this telegraph pole, just plonked there in front of my living room window. We knew nothing about it. I was horrified. It’s my garden. I’ve checked the title deeds and it’s definitely my land.”

Naturally Mr Brown wrote to Openreach with a complaint but, despite waiting for 8 long weeks, the operator failed to respond (we’d be pretty darn angry at this too). The issue seems likely to have occurred because the garden is close to a piece of council owned land, although from the pictures (see the Daily Record for those) the boundaries are perhaps not as clear as they could be.

In the past the council actually cut some of the lawn at the edges of the garden for them. But this stopped a few years ago after the local authority confirmed, in writing, that they would no longer do this as it was private land and needed to be maintained by the couple (owners) themselves.

A spokesperson for Openreach said: “Following investigation, we’ve established this pole was put up in error. We’re really sorry and we’re arranging to have it removed.” Despite the apology, it should never have required the owners of the property to go to the press in order to get some movement from the operator. The issue might not have even been noticed had they actually responded to the complaint and recognised their mistake sooner.