Linden Gardens Road Surfacing Fund— A request for your support

Hi there, and thanks for coming to our page, your support means the world to us.

We are a small new development in Carterton, and for the last 5 years, we have lived on a building site that was never finished. Many of you will have walked through this estate on your way to Kilkenny Country Park. The families here have been left with an unsurfaced road and footpaths, crumbling surfaces, safety risks, flooding, and the threat of enormous personal costs because Oxfordshire County Council chose not to enforce the legal safeguards designed to prevent exactly this situation.

The developer of our estate, TH Carterton Ltd (Taggart Homes), dissolved before completing the site. We later discovered that Oxfordshire County Council should have secured an APC bond of £271,161 from the developer before construction began in 2020. This bond exists in law precisely to prevent residents from being left with unfinished roads and huge bills if a developer fails.

But the bond was never collected by the Council, and they took no enforcement action to prevent this situation occurring. Despite warning them for years, and asking for their help time and time again, the Council refused to step in.

We have been fighting this for years, and have gone through every formal complaint process and manner of escalation available to us. To our disbelief, the Local Government Ombudsman decided not to investigate the Council’s failure, on the grounds that a resolution would be too costly for the Council to bear. They ignored the fact there would have been zero cost to the Council or residents if the Council had collected the security bond from the developer as they were supposed to do in the first place.

It was entirely avoidable, but we have been repeatedly let down. So now here we are. Years have passed, the costs have escalated, and the road surface continues to deteriorate with every passing month. All of these processes take time, but the road cannot wait any longer, especially with another winter looming just around the corner. The financial burden has fallen entirely on ordinary families who did nothing wrong, and who, like anyone, believed the road would be finished.

Our estate includes young families, elderly residents, key workers, and military personnel. This fundraiser is our last resort — we know there are so many causes worthy of your support, but after years of fighting to get this resolved, we are in a truly desperate situation, and so we are asking for your help.

We urgently need to raise funds now to:

The most favourable quote has come back at £75,875 (before VAT) from a local family-run company able to undertake the surfacing work required to the correct standard.

Your donation will directly help a community that has been let down by the very systems designed to protect it. Every contribution, large or small, brings us closer to restoring safety, fairness, and normality for the families who live here — every pound genuinely makes a difference to us.

Please share this page widely to help us reach more people who care about fairness and community.

We are asking for your support to fund the basic right to a safe road and safe access to our homes, and to Kilkenny Park for the wider community. All proceeds will be used specifically for the surfacing work required.

Thank you for reading, for caring, and for helping us put right what should never have gone wrong.

From all of us here at Linden Gardens, thank you.