Driveway drainage & surface water in Macclesfield
Water is what kills driveways and it is what the rules are actually about. Standing water softens a sub-base, gets into cracks and freezes, washes fines out of joints and undermines edges. A drive with good drainage and an average surface will outlive a drive with a beautiful surface and nowhere for the rain to go, every single time.
The legal position is straightforward once someone says it out loud. Surface water must not be connected into a foul sewer. Part H of the Building Regulations sets out the order of preference — infiltration into the ground first, then a watercourse, and a surface-water sewer last and only with the water company's agreement. And since October 2008 an impermeable surface over five square metres in a front garden has needed planning permission unless it drains to a permeable area inside your own boundary.
That last rule has a genuine local edge to it. Cheshire East's Preliminary Flood Risk Assessment names Macclesfield as the borough's ONLY designated Flood Risk Area, with 47 internal flooding incidents recorded since 2011 — the highest of any town in the borough — and attributes part of that to an ageing network of unmapped, culverted watercourses running under the town. Every front garden that gets paved impermeably adds to what that system has to carry.
The practical answers are unglamorous and mostly cheap if they go in with the drive rather than after it. A linear channel across the threshold where a drive falls towards the house or the garage. Falls set away from the building rather than towards it. A soakaway sized for the area and sited far enough from foundations. Or simply choosing a permeable build-up in the first place, which sidesteps most of it.
Drainage & surface water — every job, in detail.
1 jobs in this category. Each has its own page explaining what's involved, what your contractor checks and — just as importantly — when a job can safely wait.
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Describe it in your own words on the quote form. Your contractor will work out what the job actually is when they ring you back — usually the same day.
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