House purchase issue

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Hello Everyone,

Myself and my partner are in the process of purchasing our first house and we’re now in a situation about the purchase and are looking for advise and opinions from people who might have also been in similar situation.

So we've the house picked out we want to purchase, standard 3 bedroom semi & our booking deposit is down. It’s a new house (last house in this particular development - which means the estate will finished when our house is finished) and our house is part of phase 3 of this development.

Everything had been going smoothly until we met with our solicitor to sign the contracts. He has found one issue with the purchase. As part of the planning permission for the development, the developer has to give affordable housing to the council (this is standard for every development). Or the developer can offer to give the council a monetary contribution or land instead of a house(s). Nothing unusual about that either.

However for our particular house in question (I'm assuming all the houses in this phase are in the same situation) the council haven't received anything yet from the developer. There is a letter from August 2008 from the council stating the council are willing to accept money instead of a house(s) for this phase and asked that the developer contact the council to sort this out. However nearly 2 years later this hasn't been resolved. The developer is saying that they've made offers to council but no agreement has been made.
We're due to get the keys (if we decide to go ahead with it) at the end of August.
If we proceed with the purchase - according to our solicitor, if this doesn’t get sorted, the very worst case scenario that could happen down the line would be that the council would have the right to knock our house (however the chances of it going this far would be extremely slim).
The developer can only give their word that they’ll do their best to sort this as soon as they can but it’s not going to happen before we’re due to get the keys.
So our question is – do we go ahead with the purchase of the house and take the gamble that this will get sorted?
There are no empty houses (as far as we can see) – apart from the ones been built at the moment – in the estate (approx20 houses in the phase). So either other buyers weren’t made aware of this issue or decided to take the builder’s word that it would be eventually sorted.
Has anyone ever been in a situation similar to this? And if so – what did they do?
As I’ve mentioned before – we’re first time buyers so we’re looking for as much advice as we can get before we tie ourselves into a mortgage.
All comments appreciated! Thanks.

Ponster

Closed as OP has posted same question in a better forum.