Despite the flippant title, this question has several key points to answer:

Firstly, neither the administrator nor the volunteer committee members deserve to receive such messages while they are working hard for the benefit of the community. In the words of one of our previous chairmen “we do this for love (of Ifold) and if we don’t see any love in return then you may find yourself without a committee”.

If you feel the need to vent, please come and talk to me directly.

So what would be the outcome of IEL committee running out of volunteers? We’d all save a couple of hundred pounds a year, right? Probably not. Let’s look at the most likely options:

1) IEL could outsource everything to a property management company.

As a commercial enterprise, they would charge for all the tasks currently being done by volunteers, and they would want to see a profit. Some of the closes within Ifold already have such management companies and the annual bill is in the range of £600/house for significantly less work, so we could anticipate the current IEL maintenance charge tripling or quadrupling in this scenario.

2) IEL could sell the land to a speculative property management company.

Search online for the term “fleece-hold” and you may see this as a bad idea.

3) Just create a public right-of-way and then the council will take care of us, right?

No, the three legal concepts of ownership, Rights-of-Way, and the obligation for maintenance are separated, so creation of a vehicular RoW would lead to more traffic with no obligation to for the council to maintain anything.

4) OK, then get the council to ‘adopt’ the roads!

Extremely unlikely. This has been discussed in the past and didn’t happen, and with the current local government climate of austerity, plus other barriers like the NERC act of 2006, it is even less likely to happen now.
Even if it did happen, the local council would need to spend a lot of money to bring the roads up to public highways standards and under the Streetworks Act (now a sub-section of the Highways Act) that cost would be passed straight to the frontagers: Ifold residents. Calculating on the back of a postcard, this would be a few million pounds, which is equivalent to 25 years of the IEL maintenance charge.

5) Do we need any of this maintenance anyway? Let’s just stop and see what happens.

You are invited to visit Durfold Wood, which I am told is in this ‘degrading’ phase. Also Mill Lane Ashington which is in the end-game, where driving across the shared road is worse than going over a ploughed field. Of course its not just the roads that need maintenance, we’d be knee deep in fallen leaves and overflowing ditches.

6) Lets just get our wheelbarrows out and do it ourselves.

This is actually the exact situation in the 1960’s and 70’s that caused residents to pull together and form IEL back in 1973: to have one resident’s association able to organise and centralise the work on behalf of the community.

… and so we go full circle!