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Advice on Council Work Permits please?
Our fitters were on site today when a nice chap from the council asks if we have a permit to install a fascia on the front of a shop as we have a scaffold.
I went to site and was presented with a form to fill in…..with a fee of £150 😮 😮 He says it is valid for a month, well i only need a day and by the time I am back with payment the job will be done.
After some wrangling he let it go, but we are going back tomorrow and he may welll ask again. Sorry I wont be paying. The form also said that we have to pay a bond of £75 per metre (refundable if no damage to the pavement and we have to have public liability up to £10 Million.
What a joke, Are these councils for real? sounds like a racket to me. If its valid for 28 days, I may consider paying pro rata for 2. Feckers
Anyone else heard of this? We dont do lots of shop fronts so maybe I was out of touch?
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4 Replies
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have heard of H&S digging folk on the passing by chance… but not like that and waving fees under their noses.
best way to stop random over ambitious H&S officers is to have your guys with viz-bibs, steel toe boots, conned off pavement, men at work signs and so on… i dont mean heavy road calming setup, just the smaller stuff which shows your working with H&S in mind.
it could be that you are working in a zone that forbids it all within a time window. by that i mean some places with heavy footfall forbid work between 8am and 7pm that sort of thing is common and ive seen me and our lads having to turn up at 5.30am to get high street shops done in edinburgh princess street, and shopping centres are famous for it.
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Rob
Wasnt PPE, got that, didnt complain about being a hinderance as such and we are not on the busiest of streets. He was more concerned with damage to the public highway and £150 for the privalidge.
It is a very large fascia we are putting in, over 20 mteres, ali tray with halo LED built ups, but planning permission is in place for this too. I will check the planning docs this morn to see if any guidance is outlined in that.
If we were there erecting a semi perm scaffold and refurbing a building or such like then maybe but not a what we are doing. If we were working off ladders then he wouldnt say anything (got them on standby). On their website it does seem to direct the scaffold info at larger structures.
Will see what happens today.
Steve
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Standard stuff here, permit to work on the high street required for every job – cheaper at £60. Don’t think you really have an option to say ‘not paying it’ we just quote the job to the customer and add on any permit fees. We don’t go through this for really small jobs but anything of any significance and it has to be done.
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Seems to vary from Council to Council, it’s one of those things where they have the option to charge if they want to and set their own rate. Some Councils charge more than others as Gavin has indicated. Like Gavin I use to just inform the customer that the Council required it and added it to the Bill. Could be wrong but think it was about £75 here. Can’t remember being asked what level of Public liability I had but may of been on the form. I use to do quite a bit of work in shopping centres and they always asked for at least 10 million Public Liability and that was a few years ago.
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