Prior to any on the ground activity the acquisition team would work with the construction and deployment to team to define areas that would facilitate the successful deployment. This would require the site to be a maximum of 50m away from the existing site, to ensure coverage and transmission solutions were not compromised. This would often result in the only available option being the current SP, or the former SP in the cases where a site had been sold to a lease aggregator. As a lot of these tower swaps were being carried out under existing rights, landowners were often initially quite hostile to the proposals. Therefore, it was at the desktop review stage where it was critical to fully understand what was required from a deployment perspective, what the rights the lease granted and have an understanding of the mindset of the SP.
An innovative approach that was taken in many cases, depending on specific lease clause wording, was to deploy the site under the existing alteration rights, provided access to the SPs surrounding land was permitted under the lease. Effectively the tower was being deployed as part of the enabling works to allow the existing tower to be altered. To help facilitate this and ease the conversation with what may potentially become a very hostile SP, a disturbance payment was offered for the inconvenience caused for the deployment and recovery of the temporary structure, not the occupation of the structure.
This had the benefit of deflecting what could be an awkward situation, but also allowing prompt deployment of the temporary structure with no re-course to temporary licences and any implication that this may have had under the new Code, especially with a permanent tower occupation under the old code. Additionally the disturbance payment was paid as a project cost, and not an estates cost, with the twofold benefit of the charge would form part of the wider project deployment cost, this speeding up the payment and not requiring the estates function to process and raise the payment. In instances where a temporary licence to occupy was required, this was drafted in a new code compliant format.
