What is the difference between a drain and sewer and who is responsible for them?
A drain takes wastewater from a single property. The owner or occupier of the property, which gains benefit from the drain, is solely responsible for its maintenance. There are two kinds of wastewater, foul water, and surface water. Toilets, sinks, baths, showers and kitchen appliances all discharge foul waste water. Roof down pipes, drains in driveways and open paved areas in your property discharge surface water (rainwater). The two must be kept separate and the one not discharged to the other. Sewers A sewer is a pipe, which takes foul or surface water from more than one property. It may be either privately owned or known as a Public Sewer Private sewers By definition, a private sewer serves several properties, i.e. drains from more than one property connect to it. It is important to note that a private sewer or Drain can run under public land, verges, footway, highway or third party private land and they remain private right up to the point of connection with the Public Sewer (see
