Professional Consultant Certificate impasse

user1977

lfc321 said:

What extra protection is a PCC supposed to provide?

As I explained above, it gives you title to sue the professional if they were negligent in their element of the project. So not a "if anything goes wrong we'll sort it" warranty, but a "if anything goes wrong and it was our fault, we'll sort it"...

Pat38493

lfc321 said:

This all sounds very odd - hundreds of houses are bought and sold every day that have had extensions or otherwise been modified. Many of these don't even have Building Control sign-off, let alone a PCC. And as you rightly say, there is no requirement for an architect for such works in any case.

It sounds like planning permission was in place (which shows that the development was legal - assuming built according to the permission) and also that BC sign-off was done (as others have said, this is not a guarantee - but it at least provides some level of reassurance that the work was done according to current regs). What extra protection is a PCC supposed to provide?

It is perfectly normal when purchasing a 'second hand' house not to have any kind of warranty or protection. That is what surveys are for. But even with a survey, when you buy a house you always take some degree of risk over its structural integrity, as no survey will uncover all possible defects. Many houses that are bought and sold are decades or even hundreds of years old, and come with no warranties and no-one to sue if it turns out to have issues.

Is your lender insisting on a PCC, or is this just a case of 'advice' from the surveyor? If it is just the surveyor saying this, in your shoes I would be ignoring them. If the lender is insisting on a PCC (which I would be very surprised about), you may have a bigger problem.

It is the surveyor so far.  We have applied to port our mortgage but we don't have a decision yet, so a good indication will be if our mortgage porting gets refused.  However it's a very low 7% LTV and the lender did not ask for access to the property so they may not pick it up - if the LTV was high they would for sure have inspected the property in more detail.

You can find other threads on here from people whose lenders insisted on a warranty in similar cases like this. The key point is when the surveyor deems that the property has "recently been significantly altered or refurbished" (sample wording taken from the Nationwide BS mortgage lending terms).  The common understanding of recently seems to be 6 years.

I discussed this again this morning with our surveyor - you are correct that the risk is in some ways similar to any older house that you buy - however, the surveyor pointed out that the extension was only built less than 2 years ago.  The reason new build houses come with a mandatory 10 years structural warranty is that structural defects may only become apparent after quite a few years of weathering and use.  It takes 2 years before they will even fix cosmetic settlement of it.

There should be a transferrable structural warranty for recently constructed extensions.  We are buying the house at the top of our budget on the understanding that it's been recently completely renovated.  We cannot afford in our financial planning to take on the risk of a future £30K bill for fixing shoddy work on the extension, albeit that it's a low probability risk with high consequence

I suppose it's possible that a different surveyoer might have a different definition of "significantly altered" but I am not going to pay for x number of surveys on the hope that one gives the answer I want.

GDB2222

lfc321 said:

This all sounds very odd - hundreds of houses are bought and sold every day that have had extensions or otherwise been modified. Many of these don't even have Building Control sign-off, let alone a PCC. And as you rightly say, there is no requirement for an architect for such works in any case.

It sounds like planning permission was in place (which shows that the development was legal - assuming built according to the permission) and also that BC sign-off was done (as others have said, this is not a guarantee - but it at least provides some level of reassurance that the work was done according to current regs). What extra protection is a PCC supposed to provide?

It is perfectly normal when purchasing a 'second hand' house not to have any kind of warranty or protection. That is what surveys are for. But even with a survey, when you buy a house you always take some degree of risk over its structural integrity, as no survey will uncover all possible defects. Many houses that are bought and sold are decades or even hundreds of years old, and come with no warranties and no-one to sue if it turns out to have issues.

Is your lender insisting on a PCC, or is this just a case of 'advice' from the surveyor? If it is just the surveyor saying this, in your shoes I would be ignoring them. If the lender is insisting on a PCC (which I would be very surprised about), you may have a bigger problem.

With an older property, you have a chance to see how well it has stood up over the years. 

Pat38493

GDB2222 said:

lfc321 said:

This all sounds very odd - hundreds of houses are bought and sold every day that have had extensions or otherwise been modified. Many of these don't even have Building Control sign-off, let alone a PCC. And as you rightly say, there is no requirement for an architect for such works in any case.

It sounds like planning permission was in place (which shows that the development was legal - assuming built according to the permission) and also that BC sign-off was done (as others have said, this is not a guarantee - but it at least provides some level of reassurance that the work was done according to current regs). What extra protection is a PCC supposed to provide?

It is perfectly normal when purchasing a 'second hand' house not to have any kind of warranty or protection. That is what surveys are for. But even with a survey, when you buy a house you always take some degree of risk over its structural integrity, as no survey will uncover all possible defects. Many houses that are bought and sold are decades or even hundreds of years old, and come with no warranties and no-one to sue if it turns out to have issues.

Is your lender insisting on a PCC, or is this just a case of 'advice' from the surveyor? If it is just the surveyor saying this, in your shoes I would be ignoring them. If the lender is insisting on a PCC (which I would be very surprised about), you may have a bigger problem.

With an older property, you have a chance to see how well it has stood up over the years. 

Yes, and also if the seller did all this building work and extensions, without requiring any kind of warranty for his own purposes, this does not fill me with confidence about their attention to detail or that they know what they are doing.  In an email exchange via the estate agent, the seller previously stated that there was no warranty available and the building regs covers it.  My solicitor has formally put the question again about a warranty but if it's not available we can't proceed.

I suppose there is a question over whether we should demand a significant discount on the agreed price if we are taking on all that risk, but I'm not even sure I want do that, even if the seller agreed.