Neighbour’s negligence damaging our property

Idevans

Hello, we bought our terraced house just over a year ago. The house required significant “modernising” which we were fully prepared for. However while working on the house we have uncovered more serious issues including dry rot. After having had this assessed (and quoted £6k for remedial work) it’s clear that the cause of these problems is the poorly maintained neighbouring property. This property is not occupied however a man (presumably the owner) does return occasionally following large downpours to empty buckets of water from the top floor window. You can actually see the hole in the roof from the outside so there’s no doubt that this is the main source of the damp in our property. We have tried every avenue of making contact with the owner including knocking and politely written letters offering assistance to work together on resolving the issue (before both our houses turn to crumbs) but all to no avail.
To cut to the chase, I’m hoping someone might have some advice/experience in resolving these disputes. What avenues can we explore? Council? Courts? Police?? Also, our home insurance has just recently renewed and we don’t have legal cover which might eventually come in handy. Does anyone know if this can be bolted onto an existing policy after the fact? Or can you take out more than one policy as it would be more cost effective to double up on home insurance than to pay our own legal fees should we end up going down that route. Many thanks for any thoughts on this!

Andyjp1

Hello, I’d just like to iron this one out quickly, this is not a police matter.
seek legal advice on this one.

tom9980

Contact the local council and tell them about the state of repair of the property, they do have powers to deal with this situation.

It is more likely quicker and cheaper for you to actually have the roof fixed than go legal.

AdrianC

Party Wall Act is the can of worms you're going to need to wrap your head around.

AskAsk

you can't use legal cover in your insurance to make claims for things that had happened before you took out cover.  as this is issue is now in motion, legal cover won't help if you take it out now, even if you could add it on.