Repair costs to adjacent property

MDeaville

Hi all, I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding a home insurance claim. Basics of it are that there is a shared wall between my house and an industrial unit. Someone in the industrial unit reversed into the wall and damaged it quite severely, to the extent that it badly damaged my garage. This has been assessed by loss assessors on behalf of my insurers and they have said that, as part of the repair, the roof will need to be removed. As this is an asbestos roof, this means the roof needs to come off an be replaced.

The issue is that the garage is a double that I share with a neighbour. Since the roof is continuous, my neighbour's roof needs to be replaced as well. The loss assessors dealing with my claim say they won't pay for that and the neighbour needs to do his own insurance claim to cover the cost. The neighbour's insurers say that, since the original incident hasn't damaged their garage, they can't raise a claim. My loss assessors seem to be pushing my just to take a cash settlement for half of the value of removing the whole roof but I'm not having that.

Grateful for any advice you can give me.

TELLIT01

I would not accept a cash settlement as that puts the onus on sorting things entirely on you.  Tell the insurer to get their preferred contractor to do the specialist removal work and then replace the missing roof with the modern replacement alternative.

MDeaville

Thanks for the response. Don't worry, there is no danger of me accepting the cash. The trouble I'm having is that their preferred contractor says the whole roof needs to be removed but I'm being told that my insurers won't cover it. Should they be since their contractor has said they can only remove the whole roof?

tasticz

Tell your insurer to find a competent contractor who will take on the job of repairing half of the roof at premium rate

angrycrow

Surely this should be a claim against the motor insurer for the vehicle which reversed into the wall. I would suggest the neighbour contacts them to see what remedy they will offer. 

TELLIT01

angrycrow said:

Surely this should be a claim against the motor insurer for the vehicle which reversed into the wall. I would suggest the neighbour contacts them to see what remedy they will offer. 

I agree, but I'm assuming that the vehicle which caused the damage is unknown.

Ditzy_Mitzy

angrycrow said:

Surely this should be a claim against the motor insurer for the vehicle which reversed into the wall. I would suggest the neighbour contacts them to see what remedy they will offer. 

I think the difficulty here is that the neighbour has no claim to make against any of the insurers presently involved.  Whilst the roof is contiguous, the neighbour's bit isn't damaged - thus the neighbour has suffered no loss.  The issue is that the OP's insurer suggests that repairing damage to the OP's part of the building will require working on the neighbour's roof too.  It's a matter for the OP's insurer to sort out.  If the house is an ordinary freehold the garage is, in fact, two separate buildings with a shared internal wall.  The title boundary will bisect it lengthways or crossways, depending on whether it's a normal side-by-side or back to back tandem. 
The insurance policy stipulates, presumably, that a particular builder must be employed to carry out the repair work to the OP's bit of the garage.  For reasons which aren't presently apparent, this builder has stated that the entire roof needs to come off.  God knows why, but it's a problem for the OP's insurance company - it has stated how the claim needs to be settled, but has now decided that it doesn't like said settlement method because it's proving more expensive than initially thought.  This is the fault of the insurance company.  I wouldn't take the cash and would, instead, insist that the initial promise to rectify using the chosen builder was honoured. 

MDeaville

Thanks for your advice everyone, I'm pushing back with my insurers to cover everything. Either they can pay for it all or find another contractor but that's not my problem, its theirs. There is no way I'm taking the money, its just far too much hassle for the amount that they're offering.

For the record, the actual cost of the claim will end up being covered by the party that hit the wall but the claim needs to be settled through my insurers who then reclaim it from theirs.

MDeaville

As an update, my insurers are still refusing to cover the cost of this so I'll be raising a complaint with the Financial Ombudsman.

Sandtree

To raise a complaint with FOS you need to have first exhausted your insurer's complaint process which means either a) receiving a final response letter which tells you the next step is to go to FOS or b) 8 weeks having passed since the complaint has been registered.

Have you had anyone out to assess the practicality of replacing only your half of the roof? Know nothing about roofing but instinctively feels odd that its all or nothing.

MDeaville

I've informed my insurer of my intention and I'll be asking for their final response when I get a reply.

The company's nominated contractor stated that they cannot remove half having looked at it, the reason being that it is asbestos with overlapping sheets and the location of the boundary between the 2 garages means that they cannot remove only half without cutting the sheets, which isn't the done thing with asbestos.