Every so often a question lands in my inbox that sounds simple and turns out to be anything but. This is one of them.
A reader booked a skip for a loft clearance, the skip company dropped it at the kerb outside her house, and three weeks later she had a bill she was not expecting and a very stern letter from her council. She had assumed, quite reasonably, that if the skip firm put it there, the skip firm had sorted whatever needed sorting.
Here is what I have learned, and what I would want you to check before you hand over a card number.
Image by Nathan Copley from Pixabay
The short answer depends entirely on where the skip sits
If your skip is going on your own land, which means your driveway, your yard, your parking space, you do not need a permit at all. Nobody’s permission is required and there is nothing extra to pay.
The moment any part of it touches a public road or pavement, everything changes. Section 139 of the Highways Act 1980 is blunt about it: a builder’s skip cannot be deposited on a highway without the permission of the highway authority. If it goes down without that permission, the owner of the skip is committing an offence and can be fined.
So if you have a driveway, use it. It is cheaper, faster, and removes an entire layer of paperwork from your life.
The bit nobody warns you about: every council is different
This is where my reader came unstuck and it is the part I find genuinely unreasonable.
There is no national system. Each highway authority sets its own fees, its own notice periods and its own conditions, and the differences between neighbouring areas are much bigger than you would ever guess. Birmingham is a useful example. The advised notice period there is five working days, according to skip hire permit guidance from easySkip. Birmingham City Council’s own pages confirm that and add the parts that catch people out: a permit costs £36 a week, the maximum licence period is seven days, and if a skip goes onto the road without permission the retrospective charge is £238 a week. The council will also only issue permits to skip operators registered with it, so as a resident you cannot apply yourself even if you want to.
Then compare that with elsewhere. Telford and Wrekin asks for applications ten clear working days before the skip arrives and charges a non refundable £100 administrative fee just to process the paperwork. Walsall wants three working days and prices by the day instead, starting at £12 a day for up to a week on an ordinary street and climbing to £35.75 a day for a longer placement on a traffic sensitive one, with £59 a day if the skip is still there after a month. Devon caps licences at 28 days and distinguishes between a standard application and an emergency one. Carmarthenshire requires £5 million of public liability insurance.
Same skip. Same job. Completely different rules, costs and lead times depending on which side of a boundary line you happen to live.
Who is actually supposed to apply?
Usually the skip company, because most councils will only issue a permit to the skip’s owner. That is the arrangement most people assume they are getting.
But it is not universal. Some councils, particularly in central London and parts of Scotland, expect the person hiring the skip to apply personally. If you are in one of those areas and nobody mentions it, you can end up with a skip on the road and no permission behind it.
Ask the question outright before you book. “Do you apply for the permit, or do I?” is one sentence and it closes off the whole problem.
The rules that come with the permit
A permit is not a licence to forget about the skip. Once it is on the highway, the law expects certain things, and these are what enforcement tends to pick up on.
The skip has to be properly lit during the hours of darkness. Both ends need reflective markings that meet the Builders Skips (Markings) Regulations 1984, and those markings have to be kept clean enough to actually be visible. The skip must be clearly and permanently marked with the owner’s name and a telephone number or address. And it has to be removed as soon as is reasonably practicable once it is full, not whenever somebody gets round to it.
Councils and the police can also require a skip to be moved or repositioned even when the permit is perfectly valid, and they can recover the cost of doing it from the owner.
What I would check before booking
Ask whether the price you have been quoted includes the permit, or whether it lands separately afterwards. This is the single most common source of the surprise bills people write to me about.
Ask how many working days’ notice your council needs, because if it is ten and you have booked delivery for Thursday, something has to give.
Ask who applies, you or them.
Ask what happens if the skip needs to stay longer than booked, and get the daily rate in writing before you need it.
And get all of it in writing. Not a phone call, not a friendly reassurance on the doorstep. An email you can point at later.
If it has already gone wrong
If you have been charged for something you were never told about, you are not automatically stuck with it. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, services must be carried out with reasonable care and skill, and charges you were not made aware of before agreeing are worth challenging. Put the complaint in writing, keep it factual, set out what you were told and what you were charged, and give a clear deadline for a response.
If the company will not budge and you paid by credit card, speak to your card provider about a Section 75 claim. If you paid by debit card, ask about chargeback.
Most of the time, though, this is avoidable. One question at the point of booking about who is sorting the permit and what it costs would have saved my reader a great deal of bother and quite a lot of money.
Please note this is a contributed post.
