Nowadays, solicitors routinely send forms to house sellers requiring answers to various questions, one of which is whether there is any Japanese knotweed on the property. Making a false declaration is a crime. If the vendor said there wasn't any, knowing there was, you have a case against them. Though like many of these sort of issues, it could be a case of who can afford the cleverest lawyer, and you don't want to be landed with their legal costs. I think my next course of action would be to go back to the solicitor you used to buy the house, look at the vendor's declaration, and see if the solicitor would take it on on a no win no fee basis.
I've not fenced to 7 meters but I'm not using that section of the garden for anything so is just grass. What bothers me is if I leave it in the ground, how long will it take to rot & will the area always have a contamination risk associated with it even if it does rot meaning you can't do anything with it at all in which case what good is a 10yr guarantee if i was to employ specialists ? I know it can spread if not controlled & left to flower but I'm prepared to keep spraying it for as long as it takes, as I said no signs of it so far this year.
Apparently the Environment Agency class treated ground as contaminated but I can't find a timescale for how long that lasts which implies it means indefinitely. The 10 year guarantee is for mortgage purposes mostly but it depends on the lender.
Flowering isn't a problem by the way as the plants can't set seed.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
Wild edges, I honestly think the information about & the treatment of JKW to be very debatable with many questions unanswered, in this day & age I can't believe there isn't a cast iron process for dealing with it which unfortunately appears to be the case. I'm happy to keep pouring glyposate on it as & when required but like I said I don't see what good employing specialists is when they'll leave it in the ground, does not solve the contamination issue & after 10 years if it doesn't grow back you don't have to declare it to a mortgage lender.
It will travel underground and come up yards away, it also comes up through tarmac. I understood it was a notifiable pernicious weed. There was a forest of it along a water course near my daughter's house which the council eventually sprayed. Cannot see any growing yet but every little piece will grow if broken off the main plant. I assume the council treated it to avoid it travelling along the river. Left to its own devices it would overtake native species.
Surely the biggest difficulty with doing anything about non-disclosure of a JKW problem when the house was bought, is that the vendor could easily turn round and say they didn't know it was JKW. How can you prove otherwise unless they had called in professionals to try to treat it? I don't know what it looks like and I've been gardening most of my life.
If the previous owners weren't gardeners, and simply kept the place looking decent by hacking back stuff, they may genuinely have not known.
KT53, this is exactly what happened, the property was a rental by the previous owner who only owned it for 4 years, i took legal advise & was told it would be extremely difficult to prove as the owner never lived in the property. I do blame myself to a degree for not having a full survey but in the depth of winter would it actually have been found anyhow. We are modest gardeners to a degree & we thought it was asparagus when it started to show through so i can understand how it can be overlooked.
Nowadays, solicitors routinely send forms to house sellers requiring answers to various questions, one of which is whether there is any Japanese knotweed on the property. Making a false declaration is a crime. If the vendor said there wasn't any, knowing there was, you have a case against them. Though like many of these sort of issues, it could be a case of who can afford the cleverest lawyer, and you don't want to be landed with their legal costs. I think my next course of action would be to go back to the solicitor you used to buy the house, look at the vendor's declaration, and see if the solicitor would take it on on a no win no fee basis.
Slightly off topic.
The form that the seller fills is non binding and is based on trust. It is bot legalky binding. We moved into a house few years ago and seller informed us that gas central heating/boiler was in working condition. The day we moved in the boiler was condemned as it had not been serviced in years. We contacted our own solicitor and another one who informed us that the seller information. ..is purely that as in information. It stinks but that is the current legal posituon
That seems to be the case. I assume the canes cannot be guaranteed to be dead below that point but I will ask the contractor to clarify that as I'm curious too. The scheme requires a 7 metre control zone around the knotweed in all directions from the furthest point of the above ground growth. It was sprayed last year and is showing strong growth already this year.
Wild edges, this is interesting ref the re-growth, how long has the JKW been established in this instance, what was it sprayed with, at what dilution ratio & how many times ?
If he only owned it for four years, he may have been told about it when he bought it. Would you have any way of tracing it back to then. It's not very long. If he didn't pay cash his mortgage lender would have had a survey done.
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Flowering isn't a problem by the way as the plants can't set seed.
The form that the seller fills is non binding and is based on trust. It is bot legalky binding. We moved into a house few years ago and seller informed us that gas central heating/boiler was in working condition. The day we moved in the boiler was condemned as it had not been serviced in years. We contacted our own solicitor and another one who informed us that the seller information. ..is purely that as in information. It stinks but that is the current legal posituon