Couple’s fury as they’re wrongly charged £70,000 by council for extension at their house after ‘failing to fill out the right paperwork’
A retired couple have been forced to remortgage their home after a council slapped a £70,000 charge on them for a new extension.
Steve and Caroline Dally were hit with the bill when they unwittingly failed to fill in one of the forms required for their planning application.
The couple say they have been ‘traumatised’ buy their five-year fight to overturn the charge and will probably have to sell their home in Godalming, Surrey, to pay it off.
‘There’s no way that a retired person trying to do a small home improvement can find seventy grand,’ Mr Dally told BBC Radio Surrey.
‘It’s traumatic. You lose sleep and end up crying your eyes out. What can you do about it?’
Mr Dally, 65, won planning permission to demolish and replace the existing extension on their four-bedroom house in 2019.
But when he tried to amend the application for a slightly different design, Waverley Borough Council hit them with a £70,000 Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL).
The CIL is more usually applied to major housebuilding projects to help councils pay for the extra public services required for new homes.
Home extensions are not liable but Mr Dally had not seen the form he needed to sign to exempt him from the charge – and the council gave him no right of appeal.
Steve and Caroline Dally fear they may have to sell their home after being hit by a £70,000 charge from Wavereley Borough Council after winning planning permission for an extension
The couple had to take out a new mortgage after being given 60 days to find the money or risk repossession of their home in Godalming, Surrey
‘If I committed an act of terrorism and was found guilty I would have the right to appeal – not under CIL,’ he said.
‘They pursue you relentlessly to get the money out of you. There’s no compassion, there’s no understanding.’
The couple were initially refused permission for their amended plan, but then told ‘if you follow a different process we’ll reconsider it’, Mr Dally said.
‘We started the work,’ he added. ‘Four months later we got the letter through and we’re just about entering Covid.
‘The council refused to consider any alternatives, they refused to withdraw the liability notice, they just refused to listen.’
He claims the council gave him just 60 days to come up with the £70,000 or risk being sent to prison and having his home repossessed.
He increased his mortgage payments by £400 a month to pay the bill as the family began lobbying councillors, his MP and the Local Government Ombudsman.
Five years on the couple have celebrated a ‘watershed moment’ after the council agreed to a ‘discretionary review’ of the case.
‘It’s a long way to go yet,’ the grandfather-of-four said, noting that he remains at the mercy of the council.
Plans for the two-story extension were approved by the council, but the couple have endured a five-year nightmare after failing to spot a form which would have exempted them from the bill
Mark Walker, 52 (left), fell foul of the same issue in 2018 when he was adding space to his home to care for 81-year-old stepdad John Robert (right)
In 2018 a man in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, was slapped with a fine of £21,774 after he failed to fill in the same form while applying to build an extension to care for his widowed stepfather.
Mark Walker, 52, wanted to be close to his step-dad John Robert who was suffering from a heart condition and cancer, and who had recently survived a stroke.
But he was hit with the bill – plus a £2,500 surcharge – by Three Rivers District Council, which demanded immediate payment.
‘This is an outrageous and disproportionate penalty for a minor procedural error, which has no effect on the material nature of the project,’ he said.
‘We’re not poor, it’s a nice house in a nice area, but I’m mortgaged to the hilt and it’s not like I have that money lying around.’
And Mr Dally fears that he may be just one of many who have fallen foul of the bureaucratic oversight.
He knows of one man who was charged £200,000 and a woman looking after her husband with dementia who was hit with a £40,000 bill.
‘There will be a lot of people in Surrey that will be impacted by the same and will not know which way to turn.’
Councillor Jane Austin who helped win the review said the council is already being approached bby people wanting their cases reviewed.
‘The life-changing unintentional impacts of CIL have resulted in debt, depression and years of feeling unheard and being unanswered,’ she added.
‘As it’s been published more and more people have come out of the woodwork and come to us asking for help.
‘Because we’re talking about huge amounts of money here.
‘We see the unintended consequence of this aspect of legislation has caused great financial and emotional distress to people who have unwittingly broken rules they didn’t know existed.
‘We need to right this wrong for those who have already had to make these huge payments.’
