how do you avoid this payment of chancel?

Richard_Webster

The problem is that mortgage lenders won't tell buyers' solcitors not to arrange the insurance if the property is in an area where there is some affected property. The risk is very small, but cannot be eliminated altogether.

A buyer who is not getting a mortgage can take the view that they will accept the risk and not bother with the insurance.

Otherwise the lenders want their backs covered completely. If you want your solicitor to write to your lender and ask if they have to take out the insurance - go ahead and instruct your solicitor to do that. You will probably be waiting for 4-6 weeks to get a sensible answer from the lender and they will come back and say they want the insurance.

The problem has been largely caused by the government's change in the law. Instead of abolishing the right completely they have !!!!! footed around with this arrangement where it will die if not registered against particular properties. However it is only people who buy properties after 13th October 2013 where there is no registration who will be free of liability. Anyone buying now could still have the liability.

The whole thing is crazy and reflects badly on the Church. My personal view is that the Church is about people and not old buildings, and therefore if those who like old buildings want to have repairs carried out, great, but that has very little to do with the spread of the Gospel. Thriving Churches can either pay for repairs (mine is a 1920s former Methodist Central Hall that needs a fair bit of work on it) or find that the old church building isn't big enough anyway and find an alternative building - my daughter got married in a warehouse building in Sheffield! The right should simply be abolished altogether and then we wouldn't be fiddling about with insurance and Chancel Check Searches etc.

Having put in my personal rant about, it I get back to the point that it isn't really an option because the lenders effectively require to protect themselves and if you are getting a mortgage, your solicitor has to protect their interests, whether you like it or not.

Sayonee

we bought a property recently and had the chancel liability flagged to us by our solicitors at a cost of #88.00 indemnity insurance. We asked whether the sellers would pay, they said no , so we did. In the grand scheme of things it is a small payment for peace of mind when you are dealing with all the other costs and concerns incurred when buying a house.

Woby_Tide

Doozergirl wrote: »

You seem to suggest that people should neither carry out any search or insure themselves which might save you £50 but it might cost you the £200,000 that it is costing the affected family in Aston Cantlow! Not Moneysaving at all.

Again, there is still only 1 confirmed case of this which is the dubious part of this whole practice, wonder whether the odds are better on getting the Chancel Check policy or £80 worth of lottery tickets to cover any potential claims?!

dothemaths

Doozergirl wrote: »

I'll say again. The issue of Chancel Repair Liability being unfair, random and incredibly expensive is a totally separate argument to the issue of Chancel Liability Insurance.


I don't really think you even understand the terms properly which is why I think you are so angry about it all and arguing.

For your information, there is a thread on this board featuring someone who has buyers that for some reasion did carry out the full search, found out the property was affected and are now faced with a bill of over £1000 for insurance to cover the confirmed risk. At this point, instead of being £80 to quibble over, it's now a considerable bill that the vendor is going to have to cover themselves to keep the sale on track. Whether or not the church claims is not for the buyer to worry over. The vendor pays that big premium or it is certainly the sort of thing that a buyer would pull out over.
Unquantifiable it is indeed because until a bill is issued by a church nobody at all knows which church is falling down and can't afford the repairs, exactly what repairs are then needed or how much the repairs will cost.

The information as to how many houses are affected is in the public domain. If you pay for the full search, you will find out for sure if your house is affected. But the basic insurance premium is cheaper than the search. It's not a scam, it's pretty bloody clever. You want the search, pay for it. You want the premium instead, pay for that. You want neither and to take the risk, do that instead. Who is being exploited?


You seem to suggest that people should neither carry out any search or insure themselves which might save you £50 but it might cost you the £200,000 that it is costing the affected family in Aston Cantlow! Not Moneysaving at all.

I don't see where the scam is -
a) everyone pays for a full search at a cost of a couple of hundred pounds and then some people have to pay a very large premium on top.
b) everyone pays £6 for a quick idea of whether the parish is affected and then, if it is, pays £50 for the problem to go away. It may well make megabucks for the insurer but it's the cheapest option to insure without knowing the risk.

The fact that there are uninsured drivers out there is a bad thing. The fact that we have to pay extra on our premiums to coversubsequent losses is a total PITA but the fact that we will then still be covered for our losses in the case that we are hit by an uninsured driver is a good thing. What needs to be addressed is the uninsured drivers, not for us to stop paying extra to keep ourselves protected.

Same with Chancel Repair Liability. It's this that needs to be addressed, not the insurance to cover against it.

I think we are coming to this from completely different standpoints. If you are saying that some insurance company is making 'mega bucks' out of this Chancel insurance lark because they are 'bloody clever' I do not agree. I would suggest that it is because they have a monoploy and are exploiting consumers. You may think its clever - I think it is a rip-off, a scam.

Your attemted analogy with car insurance doesn't work. Car insurance is extremely competitive and there are a multitude of companies out there that would give you a quote. Consumers are not criminals trying to duck their responsibilities as you seem to imply.

You also seem to confuse the chance of an event occuring, and the financial liability of the event occuring - they are not the same. Witness the recent £4.5M payout to an unknown Man U reserve who had his leg broken in a football match - a lot more than most Chancel repairs I would venture to suggest!

Richard_Webster

I know of at least three companies that do Chancel Repair Insurance - Chancel Check themselves, First Title, and Norwich Union. The premiums are round about the same for all of them. There are probably others.

dothemaths

Richard_Webster wrote: »

I know of at least three companies that do Chancel Repair Insurance - Chancel Check themselves, First Title, and Norwich Union. The premiums are round about the same for all of them. There are probably others.

As a conveyencing solicitor you don't know if there are others!!! Worrying indeed - what are we paying you guys for?

In the eyes of an economist, believe me if there are only 3 suppliers - it's a monopoly/cartel/uncompetitive. And to think that 2 people have thanked you for your response - gee, are they solicitors also?

A man walked into a shop and bought a camera for £500. The shop assistant charged him £505 - the shop assistant said that the fiver was for the carrier bag that he put the camera in. The purchaser said "I don't need a bag", the shop assistant said, "Yes you do, becasue if you walk out of here and drop the camera on the pavement, then you are liable to pay the council £3M for ruining their pavement". But the purchaser said that he had insurance and anyway he said that he was paying by credit card and was insured anyway. He was told that his ordinary insurance would not pay up.

He thought for a while and then paid up - after all, it was only a fiver!

Really? Would you pay up? Get a life ....Chancel Insurance/Liability/Indemnity is a con/scam/rip-off. Don't cough up and save yourself a packet.

guppy

dothemaths wrote: »

Really? Would you pay up? Get a life ....Chancel Insurance/Liability/Indemnity is a con/scam/rip-off. Don't cough up and save yourself a packet.

As Richard has made quite clear on various occasions; if you're getting a mortgage, you may have no option but to take it out.

I agree though, it is otherwise bordering on a scam.

GunJack

I looked into this last year when the house we were buying was found to be liable...the issue has affected far more than one family in the UK, and the £80 policy that has the potential to save you thousands due to an outdated archaic law is a good thing....repealing the law itself would be even better in my opinion, and make the church responsible for it's own buildings, as are homeowners..

dothemaths

GunJack wrote: »

I looked into this last year when the house we were buying was found to be liable...the issue has affected far more than one family in the UK, and the £80 policy that has the potential to save you thousands due to an outdated archaic law is a good thing....repealing the law itself would be even better in my opinion, and make the church responsible for it's own buildings, as are homeowners..

So how many has it affected? Two? If anybody knows anybody who has been affected by this - please get then to contribute.

You are completely off target in blaming the church - they are not making a penny out of this - it's the insurance companies! People who are buying a house, keep getting advice to handover £80 for needless policies because they are told it is a 'good thing'!

Mugs or what?

Richard_Webster

As a conveyencing solicitor you don't know if there are others!!! Worrying indeed - what are we paying you guys for?

In the eyes of an economist, believe me if there are only 3 suppliers - it's a monopoly/cartel/uncompetitive. And to think that 2 people have thanked you for your response - gee, are they solicitors also?

People who supply these policies make sure that they circulate all the conveyancing solicitors with information about what they do so it is unlikely that there are many others out there that are more competitive.

Some solicitors charge a fee for arranging any kind of conveyancing related policies. I don't do this, but as a reasonable trade off I am not going to go delving around for a possible small saving, particularly given the level of the cost anyway. I had a client once who found a company that told him that their policy would cost I think £39 instead of £51 which was the cheapest I could easily arrange on line. The cheaper one was with some broker where I would have send an e-mail and then complete their form and the time for me in doing it was going to be worth more and I would have charged the client more than the difference for fiddling around with it.

Chancel Insurance/Liability/Indemnity is a con/scam/rip-off. Don't cough up and save yourself a packet.

If you aren't getting a mortgage you can take that view, but if you are, then in my view we are stuck with dealing with it. All it takes is for the Mortgage Lenders to get the Council of Mortgage Lenders handbook changed to add a paragraph: "We do not require you to carry out a Chancel Check Search."

Quite a number of lenders do not require Environmental searches to be carried out, so they could take a policy decision to do the same for Chancel Check Searches.