Proving negligence

Dilcia25

I have been advised that my insurance company cannot pursue a claim against my neighbour as negligence cannot be proved. Next door a pipe burst and flooded into my house. The tenants weren't there, ( often aren't), and I had to phone Places for People, ( which took hours and cost me money), to get the water turned off. They had it turned off about 3/4 hours later. Apparently, just because the neighbours weren't there doesn't mean there was any negligence. Also I don't know what caused it to burst, and these two things mean negligence cannot be proved. All this means the cost will come entirely from my insurance.
Can anyone advise me if there is anything I can do? The letter says I can pursue a claim against the third party ( is that the tenant or P for P?) or insurer for my uninsured losses. Not sure what they would be.

Aretnap

Your uninsured losses would be any losses you've suffered which aren't covered by your own insurance - your excess being the most obvious one.

The third party you could in theory claim against would be whoever you think is liable for the damage to your house - possibly the tenants, possibly the landlord, possibly nobody. As your insurers have said to make a claim against them you would noramlly have to prove that they were negligent - the mere fact that the water came from their property.

Negligence means failing to take the amount of care that would be expected of a reasonable person. So for example, not being at home is obviously not negligent - reasonable people do occasionally leave their homes. And having a pipe burst is not in itself evidence of negligence - it's the sort of thing that happens occasionally, even to reasonably careful people.

The best way to demonstrate neglicence would be to show that a reasonable person would have realised that the pipe was at risk of leaking - perhaps because it had leaked before - and that the tenant and/or landlord had made little or no effort to get it fixed. However if it simply burst without warning then there's unlikely to be any negligence. Some things in life are just bad luck - not your fault but not your neighbour's fault either. In that situation nobody is liable for damage to anybody else's property, so everybody has to either claim on their own isurance (it's what you pay your premiums for) or else pay for their own losses.