Chancel Repair Liability

Fishingtime

We had to pay £100 last year for the Chancel Repair Liability insurance.
That is for 35 years

lynneinjapan

We've just had the same thing through for the house that we're buying. For a house on a plot of less than 5 acres, the scale of premiums starts from £45.74 for up to £100K of cover for 25 years (non-successor - i.e. if you sell the house within the 25 years then the buyer doesn't benefit). Including successor cover it's £70.75.

£250K of cover for 25 years is £59.75 (non-successor - this is the figure that our solicitor has quoted in his covering letter) / £100.75 (successor).
£100K of cover for 35 years is £85.75 (successor only) and in perpetuity (i.e. forever, no matter who buys house) it's £95.75.

Interesting to note that the company offering the insurance (ChancelSure) is the same company that carried out the search! Might be worth shopping around to see if anyone else offers cheaper packages.

Richard_Webster

There isn't a lot of difference in price between all the companies doing this kind of insurance, (around £50-£60 for the cheapest basic cover) once you have done the basic "Chancel Check".

Although it is hardly a major issue when it comes to choosing a solicitor some firms (such as mine) do have a block insurance. I simply insure each purchase of an ordinary house/flat with 25 years cover for up to £1million and it only costs my clients £10 - we don't bother with the basic search because it costs more! Perpetual cover costs £15! So if the property is in an affected parish the clients make a saving of at least £40-£50.

Before anyone e-mails me (as they have done before), sorry, I can only do this for my own clients and their buyers.

lynneinjapan

If you're buying in a suburb of a big city, is it even worth buying the insurance (provided that it's not a condition of your mortgage)? Although ChancelCheck make things difficult by not telling us which historial parish the house is in, Wikipedia suggests that we historically come under Yardley, which is a good 3 miles away with wall-to-wall housing in between, so any liability is going to be divided between several thousand properties... so a bill for, say, £500K of repairs might be split between 5,000 households, making each one liable for only £100.

Quote from Wikipedia:

The parish of Yardley, historically considered part of Worcestershire, became the only parish in the Yardley Rural District under the Local Government Act 1894, and was added to Birmingham and Warwickshire in 1911.[5] The ancient parish of Yardley included the areas known as Stechford and Hall Green.

In fact I've found statistics showing that there are around 10,000 households in Stechford & North Yardley and another 9000 in Hall Geen and 11,000 in Acocks Green, so there are probably something like 25000 properties in the whole parish, even allowing for some of them having the freehold shared between several households. And from what I've read on this and other threads, it's only a proportion of these that come under the "rectory" heading and so are liable for chancel repairs... so the chances of us being liable are maybe somewhere around 25%, and even if we are, we're unlikely to have to fork out much once the repair costs have been split between all the liable properties.

Besides, the parish is going to have such a hell of time enforcing this that it may not be worth its while even bothering.

Edit: I've found a whole website on the topic! http://www.chancel.org.uk/ - off to have a look at it now.

Another edit:
1. Someone on the above site mentioned that the liability only applies for medieval churches that are still standing, though I haven't seen anything to back this up.
2. More worryingly, it seems that the PCC (parish church council) has only to identify a SINGLE "lay rector" (which seems to mean the owner of a freehold within the prescribed area), and that person becomes responsible for the full amount being demanded - it's up to them to get their neighbours to pay a share! So my earlier assumptions about the liability being divided between thousands of properties appear to be incorrect.