Who decided not to purchase chancel repair liability insurance?

maninthestreet

If you do decide to buy the insurance, read this first before buying any policy:

http://radiac.net/diary/id/1301/

Greg_Yerbury

I have been running a blog on this subject

You will need to need to go to goggle
'chancel repair liability Greg yerbury blog' (this forum won't let me do links!)


although my next post 'the iniquity of Chancel repair Liability' has yet to be posted.
Personally I do not rate chancel checking organisation very highly since I am aware of at least one place where it came back a negative but it was a positive.
By far the largest form of liability which they do pick up is apportioned liability under the 1936 Tithe Act although it is complicated to explain it boils down to a liability of normally a tiny fraction of a chancel of 0.01% per field and 12 houses on a field. There will be very few places where this is worth a PCC notifying the liability. Indeed the liability on a house could be as little of £86 if your house could be found if the chancel had £200,000 damage. Considering it would cost at least £70 to get a surveyor to find the land and then even more to collect the money and the anger the house owners would have towards the church.

There are other forms of Chancel repair liability which are personal and several under the 1836 tithe act or Enclosure acts but they often poorly documented.
For instance of the 1,100 enclosure acts (Aston Cantlow) or so that created land in lieu of tithes giving the liability I could find 590 Enclosure plans showing the land but a number of those will not to be easy to read or any good and there will be enclosure plans I could not find.

My list of places with enclosure awards with traceable maps are found on top RHS of in two PDF files.

you will need to goggle 'st michaels church penkridge chancel' and it should be towards the top.

If you are the list of 590 I think you should definitely take out insurance.

Merged land and tithe liability is often poorly mapped but it can be quite extensive but this seems to be missed at least on occasion by Chancel checking companies probably because the only way of finding it is read the tithe apportionments in some detail. As you can see by my blog I have done so to a few parishes in Devon.


Greg

Greg_Yerbury

I should have said that it is a mistake to say Glebe land is an issue it is more likely a house called Glebe farm ect is more likely to liability free because it is normally vicarage glebe not rectory glebe. Vicarage glebe never carries the liability whilst Rectory glebe owned by a lay person probably does (there is some dispute on this!).

Greg_Yerbury

drummer_666 wrote: »

rip off insurance, unless the house is in the middle of no where with nothing nearby but a parish.

it would cost such a tiny amount per house owner in a populated area that even if the parish actually asked for money it wouldn't be worth their while enforcing payment, legal costs would be higher than the money they were chasing!

Depends on the form of the liability if it is apportioned under rent charge liability by the 1936 Tithe Act you have a point. Although under other forms of liability one owner of the land is liability for the lot. Appeal Court 1935 Wickhambrook case set the precedent supported by the House of Lords in ASton Cantlow.

PS I am not supporting it, just stating the facts.

ijrwe

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

Can anyone in the know comment on what my solicitor said:

" In accordance with the Council of Mortgage Lenders Handbook it is a requirement of all lenders that where a chancel search reveals a liability, that insurance is obtained."

This makes no sense to me, of course, because the concept of CRL insurance hasn't been mentioned once by my lender, even in the material about compulsory insurances (buildings etc.)
I can see no reason why they wouldn't mention CRL insurance there, if it really was necessary. Why would they leave it to the solicitor to tell me about it, and not mention it themselves? Ultimately it's their concern, after all, not the solicitor's.

Is the solicitor talking rubbish, basically?
They also haven't offered different terms or types of the insurance, or explained what length of cover their single quote buys me. It just seems pretty odd. I don't want to press the matter any more with them yet as things are moving along nicely otherwise. If they do just go ahead and buy it for me without my consent then I'm sure I can reasonably argue that they certainly shouldn't have, for the reasons mentioned in this paragraph.

Greg_Yerbury

Basically they default to making you have to pay for the insurance if the Chancel check reveals a potential liability although I am not convinced about the accuracy of the checks. A though research would cost a lot of money to finally prove if there is a liability or not costing more than the insurance.
I would agree that that insurance companies have been making a lot of money on something that is extremely unlikely to happen.

Ray999

I agree. I was quoted well over £200 for insurance but instead decided to use a company called chancelrepairsearches.co.uk who did a full search for me which showed that the property was not even in a liable parish let alone being liable. I got pictures of maps and documents which did not mean much to me but at least I had the peace of mind that the search was done in person and not computer generated like the general checks. It seems the word 'boundary' is used loosely where insurance risk is concerned.