Chancel Repair Liability Insurance

RajaStyle

solicitors just want to make more money off you, they get kickbacks by arranging this insurance through them ... don't listen to them and arrange it yourself and you will get it half the price !

link to get you started

http://www.chancelnsr.co.uk/Chancel/PoliciesPricing.html

darren62

Well I've just found out about this garbage because my mother has been told be her solicitor that she has to pay £150 for an insurance policy for this chancel malarky.

My question in al of this is a simple one really, or I hope it is.

If this liability is for the parish churches how can someone be liable for it when they pay a part of their council tax to their parish. Our parish has a % of our council tax paid to them for the upkeep and maintenance of the parish facilities which I assume would include this little baby.

dzug1

darren62 wrote: »

Well I've just found out about this garbage because my mother has been told be her solicitor that she has to pay £150 for an insurance policy for this chancel malarky.

My question in al of this is a simple one really, or I hope it is.

If this liability is for the parish churches how can someone be liable for it when they pay a part of their council tax to their parish. Our parish has a % of our council tax paid to them for the upkeep and maintenance of the parish facilities which I assume would include this little baby.

Parish churches belong to the CofE.

They have absolutely zilch to do with the parish council

darren62

Thanks for that info.

So I suppose now the point is whether it is worth paying for the insurance as a seller or let the buyer decide whether they want to cough up and also why the solicitors are quoting a figure of £150 which seems excessive if previous posts are anything to go by.

Also, would this precede new laws or would a new law take precedent over existing laws. My point being the much talked about human rights laws and in particular what faith the owner of the property is at the time (if ever there was one) at the time of any claim by the COE.

huckster

There is a very well informed thread on this subject on the CAG site under the Insurance forum. It might be worth having a read.

deeplyblue

darren62 wrote: »

Thanks for that info.

So I suppose now the point is whether it is worth paying for the insurance as a seller or let the buyer decide whether they want to cough up and also why the solicitors are quoting a figure of £150 which seems excessive if previous posts are anything to go by.

Also, would this precede new laws or would a new law take precedent over existing laws. My point being the much talked about human rights laws and in particular what faith the owner of the property is at the time (if ever there was one) at the time of any claim by the COE.

Google "Chancel Repair Liability" and see if you can get a cheaper quotation.

As for faith - it has nothing at all to do with the owner or his faith. The point is that the obligation to pay up for the repair of the church roof goes with the land. Once upon a time it belonged to the church, and so the obligation to help maintain the church roof got attached to the land (it's complicated!) and is passed on from each owner to the next.

Some property has other obligations - such as the maintenance of an old boundary wall, or (genuine example) to keep a house painted partly blue.

Whether it's worth it is a matter for you to decide. It is not true that your mother must pay up. People have been managing without CRL cover for years; it's just that the matter came up in the 1990s with a (now notorious) case and some lawyers have been making a fetish out of covering for it. I was only really worried when we were thinking of buying a property which had belonged to another denomination, or with one house which I knew had been church property quite recently (1920s).

Yes, CRL is being abolished, but only if the church has not said that it wants to keep it for some particular bit of land. As I said, it gets complicated.

db

darren62

Once again thanks for the info.

I have told my mother to ring her solicitor or I will, and ask them to clarify what the property is liable for and how many others are also liable for the same as the solicitor has given virtually no details other than why not cough up the £150 to make sure you sell your house and it doesn't fall through.

Personally having read the info on this I think the case everyone is quoting is a one-off and something that the COF decided was an easy target otherwise they wouldn't have bothered.

What would be interesting is how many times the COE have used this law to recover costs from the masses as that would be far more expensive, time consuming and much harder to carry out.

Does anyone actually have an example of any other cases apart from the one in the public eye where the COE have used this law?

whats_up_doc

this is causing me so much worry. i have a large coe church near me.

i was thinking of going to the chancel nsr site to see if i could just purchase without a search - would that be correct.
guess what just clicked on site and its unavailable.

who hold the certificate when you have one
thanks

deeplyblue

darren62 wrote: »

Personally having read the info on this I think the case everyone is quoting is a one-off and something that the COF decided was an easy target otherwise they wouldn't have bothered.

What would be interesting is how many times the COE have used this law to recover costs from the masses as that would be far more expensive, time consuming and much harder to carry out.

Does anyone actually have an example of any other cases apart from the one in the public eye where the COE have used this law?

Don't blame the CoE too much. The PCCs have a duty to maintain the church buildings, and about enough funds to have a Sunday school picnic in the local park. They have a duty to find money for necessary (and expensive) repairs wherever they are due for it. I remember one bloke saying, "We approached English Heritage for help, and they asked us if we had tried all other sources, including chancel repair liability. We'd never heard of it til then, but until we had tried that English Heritage wouldn't help us."

I believe that there have been other cases than that of Aston Cantlow, but can't easily find any reference. BTW I think the reason that the local diocese first reassured the Walbrooks and then demanded the money was a variant on the English Heritage argument above. Since they did have a legal right to the money, no one was going to give the church the money needed for repairs, when the church could get it elsewhere.

Incidentally, one reason why the Walbrooks were so badly hit was their farm held, I think, almost the entirety of the original glebe land. In many cases the ex-church land has been built on, and so each of the houses has a liability, which means that the liability is shared out.

One vicar said, "We looked into Chancel Repair Liability, and found that there were houses built on land subject to CRL. When we looked a little more closely, we found that there were hundreds of houses and they would have been due about £37 each. It would have cost us more than that to bill them, explain and pay the solicitors to draw up the documents. We didn't bother."

In the meanwhile, you have options. It seems likely that CRL is more of a problem in rural areas than in towns - consider the housing density matter, if nothing else. If your mother's house is in an old village, it is different from being in a new estate. In the latter case you might wish to tell the solicitor that you consider CRL insurance unnecessary.

You can try investigating a little yourself. Warning: knowing that a property IS subject to CRL can vastly increase the cost of insurance. As there is no simple way of looking it up (yet), it is also a tedious and potentially time-consuming business. One thing you can do is to find out whether the local church is one where CRL exists at all - many churches don't have such things. I am not sure how difficult this is (there used to be a website, but I can't find it now), but you can go to:

http://www.chancelrepairsearches.co.uk/

They will charge you £30 (with or without VAT, it doesn't say) to tell you if you fall within such a parish.

If you don't then you can tell the solicitor that you have documentary evidence that CRL does not exist in this ecclesiastical parish.

If it does exist, then you can try going to

http://www.countrywidelegal.co.uk/Public/Chancel-Repair-Liability.aspx

and clicking on the plus sign beside the option which reads:
"What are the options once you've undertaken a search?"

This tells you that you can then take out cheap insurance, "our buyer and mortgagee policy costs just £35 (inclusive of insurance premium tax) for a limit of indemnity of £100000."

If that procedure suits your needs then you've spent £65 and not the £150 your solicitor wants for CRL insurance. You might well get away with just the £30 to prove you don't need it. Of course, your solicitor might charge you £100 for arguing with the other solicitor proving that CRL insurance is not needed.

The real pain about CRL (and one that has been exploited by a couple of very sharp operators) is that you don't know whether or not you are liable, until you search. Finding out if anyone in your parish is liable is not terribly difficult. Finding out if your property is liable is a good deal more difficult, as there are very few good records kept. It was the Walbrook's misfortune in the Aston Cantlow case that the liability was - most unusually - recorded in their title deeds.

In many cases CRL is not followed up because of the problem of establishing it. However, when it is established from church records, it does not have to show up in the house's own documents to apply. This means you can buy a property, live in it for 20 years (or even have your family live in it for 200 years) without the matter ever arising, until one day a very large bill arrives on your doorstep which you have a legal obligation to pay.

As from some time in 2013, CRL will only apply to a property if it is registered in the title deed. This means that in just over 2 years (i.e. in all probability before the house changes hands again) this whole mess will be much easier to document. If I have understood this correctly (and I AM NOT A LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT QUALIFIED LEGAL ADVICE) then if nothing gets added to the title deeds before this date in 2013, then the house will cease to be subject to CRL, whatever the situation is in 2011.

Myself, I might try telling the solicitor to offer the other party £100 off the price of the house, in exchange for them getting their own CRL insurance. This is because it is always cheaper to get it just for the existing owners (and mortgagees), and not for the existing owners and successors in title. Tell the next lot that you have no evidence the CRL exists, and that you think the cheapest way would be for you to pay for them to take out CRL insurance themselves, so that they are covered as owners. They will not then have to worry about the "successors in title" bit, because if nothing has gone on to the deeds by 2013, then the house is safe from it anyway.

The purchasers will then have to decide whether they want to go through this procedure, or hope that nothing turns up in the next 2 years and save themselves the £100.

I am, of course, assuming that the title deeds do not have CRL written into them. If you do have CRL registered against the title it should show up in the title deeds, which is easily checked if the title deeds are held electronically by the Land Registry, or if the solicitor has a paper copy.

Some dioceses have been telling their parishes to check on CRL and register it before 2013, because they might need the money. One diocese (Bath & Wells, from memory) has declared that it will register NO claims to CRL, and therefore all houses in the B&W diocese do not need CRL insurance at all.

Or you could just reckon that in the scale of house-selling costs £150 is peanuts, and easier (and possibly cheaper) than arguing with the solicitors - especially if you get to letters between solicitors. We're worrying about selling a property which is currently empty and there's been a burst pipe - and that's going to cost a lot more than £150 to put right.

db

deeplyblue

whats_up_doc wrote: »

this is causing me so much worry. i have a large coe church near me.

i was thinking of going to the chancel nsr site to see if i could just purchase without a search - would that be correct.
guess what just clicked on site and its unavailable.

who hold the certificate when you have one
thanks

Firstly do not worry over much.

(a) the reason no one had heard of Chancel Repair Liability until the Aston Cantlow case is that hardly anyone had been made to pay up significant sums for ages.

(b) the biggest problem with Chancel Repair Liability is its unpredictability. This uncertainty is being removed by law in a couple of years' time.

(c) the size of your CoE church tells you nothing much - the age is usually much more to the point.

Your parish might be too recent for CRL to apply (it's an inheritance of old parishes)

Even if the parish has some properties which are subject to CRL, then your house may well not be one of them.

Even if your house is subject to CRL now, then it might not be in two and a half years' time. Over the last few years (since a change in the law was introduced in 2002) churches who are worried about this (and not all are) have been trying to get their rights in the matter (known as their "interest") registered on the individual property deeds. If they haven't done it by October of 2013, then they've lost any rights they had and you can stop worrying about it. So, if they were worried, it would probably already be registered their interest with the Land Registry - go to their site

http://www.landregistry.gov.uk/

and find out how to ask them about this.

Even if your property is liable, and the interest registered in your deeds, then it may be that nothing happens to make the church need money for the repair of the chancel.

Even if the church roof needs attention, then it may be the roof over the nave (eastern half of the church - assuming the church faces east) that needs attention, and not the roof over the chancel (western half). The nave is the church's problem even when CRL applies.

Even if your house is liable, then you may not be liable for very much. Suppose "your" church needs to spend £200,000 on the roof, but there are lots of properties (say 2000) with CRL, then you may be liable for 1/2000 of the cost = £100!

Even if you are liable to £100, then the Parish Church Council may decide that it's not worth trying to collect the money - especially if some people decide to make an issue of it.

Even if the PCC decides that it does want the money, you could try telling them to get lost, and see if they can be bothered to face the cost and bad publicity to try and get the money from you.

Even if you decide to pay, it's only £100 - less the cost of your washing machine going wrong.

Now, insurers make their money from insuring people against high-impact low-probability events, such as being told that you have no option but hand over quarter of a million quid. But it really hasn't happened very often - see my previous post as to why the Wallbrooks were unlucky.

The only people who are still really worried about this are those who have been burned, or know they may still be liable, and - of course - solicitors acting for people buying a property, who are being paid to think up unlikely possibilities and deal with them.

However, if you won't be happy until you have some answers, try this. First check your title deeds. Given that the parishes have had 8 years out of the 10 they were given to register their interest, you might care to wait out the next 2 years anyway.

I suggest you read my reply to darren above. I'm not going to write it all out again. If you are going to sell within the next couple of years, or if you are a chronic worrier, you might want to invest in one of the cheap searches which, for £30, will tell you if your parish is one where there is any CRL.

If you get any insurance, or even just a piece of paper telling you that your parish is not liable to CRL, then you keep it with your other household documents (like the warranty on your double glazing) in a reasonably safe place, clearly marked so that you (or your heirs) can find it in a hurry. I say this with some feeling, as I'm currently regretting both my own failure to have crucial documents properly identified and located and that of someone else.

And if you are a worrier, make sure that you have a simple will drawn up by a solicitor; if you are over 45 have a proper Power of Attorney drawn up in case you are suddenly put in a coma by a stroke or a disagreement with a No 13 bus, and consider how your family would cope if you died, or became seriously disabled suddenly. A year ago my landlord died in his late 40s, leaving no will, and with his affairs in a very complicated state, and his wife and young family have had a dreadful time.

Worry about the things which have a much higher likelihood of happening that Chancel Repair Liability, before that.

db


Addendum: I've now spent as many hours as is decent on Chancel Repair Liability and insuring against it. This will be my last post on the subject. If anyone knows or believes that they have better information than mine (which is entirely possible) would they please add that to this thread. If anyone wants a repeat of this advice, then they will have to find it here via site searches or Google.

To repeat: I AM NOT A LAWYER. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE FROM ANYONE WITH QUALIFICATIONS TO GIVE IT. If you really are worried about it, then consult a solicitor - having worked out how much you are prepared to pay for legal advice which you may not want to take.

db