Roads Research

NEWS :

The Sustainability Assessment Process (SAP) has been developed by user groups to manage byway claims, and submitted to Government for validation (and possible refinements of course).

However, the "window" allowed for further claims will be set very soon, taking no account of our co-operation to date.

Accordingly, the moratorium on BOAT claims requested whilst SAP was under development can now be lifted, and claims prepared during that period should now be submitted.

We still recommend that claimants apply the SAP scoring system and submit the completed form with their BOAT claim.   If it doesn't pass SAP. the result is unlikely to be useable BOAT in any case; don't waste your own time here.
The SAP form, with worked examples, can be found in the Guides section of these pages.

Since there is little time to fully flesh out claims in the time allowed by Parliament, we further recommend that even claims with incomplete but substantial research are submitted - that can be caught up whilst awaiting processing.

Part of the claims process is to notify landowners.   By common courtesy, this is usually taken to include land adjacent to the route concerned, even though the "landowner" for the vast majority of public roads is effectively the Highway Authority.   The adjacent landowners can be difficult to trace; so remember that you can usually serve this notice on the HA rather than waste time searching for procedurally irrelevant landowners.