A PARISH councillor has called for the city council to hurry up and resolve issues preventing it from adopting public land from housing developers in Warndon Villages.

Councillor Robyn Norfolk said he’s been told by officers over the years “it’s just around the corner” but nothing ever seems to get done, while certain bits of land have fallen into ruin as a result.

When developers buy up a plot of land and build houses on it, certain pockets will be later formally handed over to the local authority to maintain.

However, if they are not brought up to a certain standard beforehand, meaning a council would need to spend money bringing them up to scratch, they can initially refuse to take responsibility.

At a previous Warndon Parish Council meeting, councillors Norfolk and Stephen Hodgson had called for land off Brecon Avenue, which includes an Astro turf pitch which is often vandalised, to be adopted.

Speaking at last Monday’s meeting, city councillor for Warndon Nida Hassan said, while there is a substantial amount of unadopted land in the Villages, the council is stuck in a Catch-22 situation.

She said developers often “don’t want to put more money into fixing” issues, and even though they’ve “promised” to maintain these spaces prior to council adoption “they don’t actually do it”.

“They build this whole area but they move on from that project, they don’t even live in this area or anywhere around this area,” she added.

Cllr Hassan added that the council is hoping to adopt several pieces of land all at once in the near future but that she is looking into the possibility of it adopting some of the smaller bits “right now”.

Cllr Norfolk said the “crux” is residents pay their taxes so “there’s some level of service we’d expect and there’s some level of service we just don’t get because of this problem between who owns the land”.

Parish councillor Andy Taylor, who is working on the Warndon neighbourhood plan, said a “significant number” of green spaces, in particular “larger plantation areas”, should have been adopted by 1993 according to the 1988 section 52 agreement of the Town and Country Planning Act 1971.

He said a city council legal representative told him a couple of years ago a letter is sent every six months to developers about condition of unadopted land “which is then ignored”.

He proposed a small delegation is set up involving both city and parish councillors.

A city council spokesman said: “Developers have a responsibility to maintain land that has not yet been transferred to the City Council. “Several areas of land were transferred to the City Council some years ago but other sites remain unadopted. "We understand the concerns of the parish and local residents and we are looking at what steps can be taken."