COUNCIL bosses could face a repair bill of £1.4million to fix hundreds of Victorian drains across Pendle - despite having a budget of just £4,000.

Pendle Council has set aside £4,250 to carry out emergency repairs to dangerous unmade streets while the total drains bill could come to an estimated £1.4million.

Now Nelson councillors have called on the council's resource management committee to increase the budget to allow residents to apply for 75 per cent grants towards the cost of repairing their disappearing back streets.

Councillor Roger Abbiss said: "There is a serious problem in Nelson of collapsing back street drains. The owner/occupiers of the houses involved are of limited means.

"The cost of repairing all these drains is probably a seven-figure sum. We don't have the resource for that kind of work but we can afford more than £4,250.

"This is a limited scheme we are proposing, but we need to keep coming back to it in future years.

"If we allow the situation to carry on, we will have collapsed sewers all over the place, a public health problem and Nelson will become a Third World town, and we can't let that happen."

But question marks have already been raised over who is responsible for the repairs and whether the council would be allowed under local government legislation to pay towards the work. The problem arises in Victorian terraced homes which formerly had an outside toilet connected to a sewer running along the back street. When inside toilets were introduced the outside "loo" was generally changed into a store.

Joints in many of the 100-year-old underground pipes have since opened up and allowed the surrounding earth to be washed away into the sewer causing holes to open up under the cobbles and the street to collapse.

Services director John Kirk, said: "Until you dig down, you don't know what you're going to find and the problems can be expensive to put right. In many cases it is the householder and not the council who is responsible for carrying out repairs."

He said the council had no money to give renovation grants to householders, let alone to help fill holes in back streets.

A council report said out of every three back street toilet connections, two were private drains and one a public sewer. In the case of public sewers it is down to the water company to do repairs and reinstate the street but with private drains it is the householder's responsibility.

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