Blocked Drain Responsibility Tewkesbury | Who Pays

I had a call last month from a bloke on Wheatpieces who'd already paid another company £180 to clear a blocked drain, then got told the blockage was actually in the public sewer and Severn Trent should have dealt with it for free. He was furious. Rightly so.

This confusion costs Tewkesbury homeowners money every single week. So here's how it actually works, without the flannel.

Severn Trent Is Your Water Company Here

If you're in Tewkesbury, GL20, or the surrounding villages, Bishop's Cleeve, Bredon, Twyning, Winchcombe, your water and sewerage company is Severn Trent. Not Thames. Not Wessex. Severn Trent. Any article you read that talks about Southern Water or Anglian is irrelevant to you.

Severn Trent owns and maintains the public sewer network. That matters, because where their responsibility starts is where yours ends.

The Boundary: Private Drain vs Public Sewer

This is the bit most people get wrong.

Your private drain is everything from your property up to the point it connects with another property's drain or joins the public sewer. That section is yours. You own it, you maintain it, you clear it when it blocks.

Once your drain joins with a neighbour's, or meets the public sewer, it becomes a lateral drain. Since October 2011, lateral drains that run outside your property boundary are Severn Trent's responsibility, not yours. This transfer happened under the Water Industry (Schemes for Adoption of Private Sewers) Regulations 2011, which applied across England and Wales. A lot of people, and a lot of drainage companies, still haven't caught up with it.

The public sewer itself is entirely Severn Trent's problem.

So in practice:

• Blockage under your garden, serving only your house. That's yours to sort.
• Blockage in the shared run under the pavement outside your house, where your pipe feeds into an adopted lateral drain. Severn Trent's.
• Blockage in the main sewer in the road. Definitely Severn Trent's.

Where It Gets Complicated on Gloucestershire Properties

Older properties are where this gets messy. I work on a lot of Victorian and Edwardian terraces around the centre of Tewkesbury, and the drainage on those streets was laid long before anyone drew neat lines on a map. You can have three houses sharing a single clay pipe run that technically crosses a boundary and then doesn't and then does again.

Estates like Northway and Priors Park, mostly built from the 1960s onwards, tend to be cleaner. The adoption records are better. But even there, you'll occasionally find a shared run that was never formally adopted by Severn Trent. That puts it in genuinely disputed territory. The 2011 regulations adopted most private sewers automatically, but unadopted shared runs outside your boundary can sit in a grey area where liability isn't clean. Don't let anyone tell you it's definitely yours without evidence, and don't assume it's definitely Severn Trent's either. Get it surveyed.

The only way to know for certain where your private drain ends is a CCTV drain survey.

What Severn Trent Will and Won't Do

If you suspect the problem is in a public sewer, call Severn Trent directly. Their number for reporting sewer flooding and blockages is on their website at severntrent.com, and it's worth checking there for the current contact details before you ring, since numbers do get updated. They'll send someone out and there's no charge if it's their asset.

What they won't do:

• Clear a blockage inside your property boundary
• Fix damage to your private drain, even if a collapsed section is causing the wider sewer to back up
• Work on any pipe that hasn't been formally adopted into their network

If they attend and find the problem is on your side of the boundary, they'll tell you that and leave. You then need to call a drainage company.

What You're Actually Responsible For

You're responsible for any drain or pipe that serves only your property, from the point it leaves your house to the point it connects to a shared or public sewer.

That includes:

• The drains under your garden and driveway
• Gullies collecting rainwater from your roof or yard
• Any private inspection chambers or manholes within your boundary
• Shared drainage that was never adopted, where that can be established

If you rent your property out, the statutory responsibility for the physical drain structure sits with you as the property owner. A tenancy agreement can assign day-to-day maintenance costs, but it can't override your liability to the water company. If Severn Trent or a court decides the drain is your asset, it doesn't matter what your tenancy clause says. Don't try to pass off a structural fault or a long-term build-up onto the tenant.

The Sewer Flooding Problem

Sewers back up during heavy rain. Tewkesbury knows that better than most places. When the Avon and Severn are high, the whole drainage system under the town is under pressure. I've seen manholes on Mythe Road and down towards Tewkesbury Park lift clean off during bad floods.

If raw sewage is coming up through your drains or toilet during flooding and it's not a blockage, that's sewer surcharging. Severn Trent has a duty to deal with repeated flooding and there's a register you can get on if your property is affected regularly. That's a separate conversation, but it's worth knowing the route exists.

Get a CCTV Survey If You're Not Sure

If you've had repeated blockages and nobody's been able to tell you definitively where the problem is or who owns the pipe, a CCTV drain survey will settle it. We push a camera through the system, map what we find, and you get a report showing where your drain runs, what condition it's in, and where the connection to the public sewer sits.

That report is also useful when you're buying or selling a house, or when a drainage company has told you something needs fixing and you want a second opinion on whether it's even your pipe to fix.

It's also the only way to catch a collapsed section, root intrusion, or cracked joint before it becomes a full emergency. A lot of the jobs I go to in Deerhurst, Tredington and Bushley are older properties where nobody's looked at the drains in decades. What's down there is usually a surprise, and not a good one.

A Quick Check Before You Call Anyone

• Is the blockage affecting only your property, or your neighbours too? Multiple properties affected points to the shared or public sewer. Call Severn Trent first.
• Is sewage coming up from a manhole in the road or pavement? Severn Trent's problem.
• Is it just one drain inside your boundary, one sink, one toilet, your kitchen, your bathroom? Likely your private drain. That's where we come in.
• Do you know where your drain connects to the public sewer? If you don't, a CCTV survey will show you.
• Not sure if the pipe was ever adopted? Check with Severn Trent and, if needed, get a survey before you authorise any repairs.

Drainsco covers Tewkesbury and the surrounding GL postcodes, with engineers available 24 hours a day. No call-out fee. You'll get a clear price before we do anything. If you're not sure who's responsible, give us a ring and we'll talk it through before you commit to anything.