[John Elwin]

Originally Posted by Mike Harte

The same happened to me in Spain; over half the properties built on the road where my house was constructed were considered to be "illegal". A common theme; corruption in a town hall, repeated throughout the country and which goes right up to the top political class, and even the last king had to abdicate because he and others in the royal family had been somewhat naughty.

In our case, the town hall, in reality the mayor and his sidekick who ran the planning department, issued building licences to builders and developers from a set of documents, copies of which did not exist in the town hall. Worse than that was that the land on which they were built was deemed to be "rural", something similar to our green belt, and so no construction was permitted. What they had done was move the fence that surrounded this rural land about 50 metres into the rural land because the land owner couldn't use it for agricultural purposes and wanted to sell it off.

My builder was part of an old established family firm, honest as the day was long and and an absolutely lovely guy as was his family. They even invited a couple of my neighbours and I - they also built 4 of the adjacent properties - to a family wedding and other social events. And as the properties couldn't be registered whilst I lived there, we all had to rely on builder's supply of water and electricity which they paid for for the ten years that I owned the property. The properties couldn't be sold, in theory, but the contract that I had with the builder permitted me to "sell" it back to the builder if it wasn't fully legal, which is what I did.

I'm very glad we chose France & not Spain - i hear so many stories like that.

The friends I spoke of actually bought their house in Tewkesbury so probably not quite so corrupt!