Neighbours house subsiding. How should we approach potentially claiming for subsidence?

superlight

DullGreyGuy said:

Negligence normally is doing something a reasonable person wouldnt do or failing to do something a reasonable person would do. In some circumstances a "reasonable person" is substituted with a reasonable XXX... for example you dont consider is a surgeon has been negligent by comparing them to the average man in the street but to what a reasonable surgeon would do. Certainly Councils have been found to have a higher duty of care in relation to negligence... never had to deal with a HA so dont know caselaw in relation to them. 

Hi thanks for the reply...

Looking at this the other way round...I am a reasonable person. If I knew my house had a subsidence issue, I would do everything possible to prevent the problem worsening, before potentially damaging my neighbours house via the partition wall.

The HA tell me in an email that 'A RICS surveyor and Structural engineer are overseeing the monitoring process' of their property with the subsidence. Yet when I ask for their S.E.'s findings i.e. the cause, apparently, they don't have the information. The tenant has been raising issues with interior and exterior cracks with them for several years now. They only began monitoring in Nov 24 although some clearly much older monitoring markers are still present on the house. This confirms that the problem has be known about for much longer. I've asked the HA to confirm when these were installed. They haven't answered.

DullGreyGuy

superlight said:

DullGreyGuy said:

Negligence normally is doing something a reasonable person wouldnt do or failing to do something a reasonable person would do. In some circumstances a "reasonable person" is substituted with a reasonable XXX... for example you dont consider is a surgeon has been negligent by comparing them to the average man in the street but to what a reasonable surgeon would do. Certainly Councils have been found to have a higher duty of care in relation to negligence... never had to deal with a HA so dont know caselaw in relation to them. 

Hi thanks for the reply...

Looking at this the other way round...I am a reasonable person. If I knew my house had a subsidence issue, I would do everything possible to prevent the problem worsening, before potentially damaging my neighbours house via the partition wall.

The HA tell me in an email that 'A RICS surveyor and Structural engineer are overseeing the monitoring process' of their property with the subsidence. Yet when I ask for their S.E.'s findings i.e. the cause, apparently, they don't have the information. The tenant has been raising issues with interior and exterior cracks with them for several years now. They only began monitoring in Nov 24 although some clearly much older monitoring markers are still present on the house. This confirms that the problem has be known about for much longer. I've asked the HA to confirm when these were installed. They haven't answered.

Most my claims days were done in Motor and whilst did touch on Home (eg when a policyholder had left the road and hit a house) it never involved subsidence claims for obvious reasons. Oddly I very briefly did Space insurance claims too but thats another story. So no hands on experience but have considered matters from a higher level through work since leaving claims. 

Having read some Subsidence claim files it very much depends on if it's known if the subsidence is active or historic. Sometimes you can tell it's active and sometimes it looks historic. If it looks historic or you believe you have fixed the problem it would be normal to start with monitoring, this can go on for some time obviously depending on what you find... if no signs of movement the checks get less frequent and normally ends at somewhere between 12 and 36 months. If there are signs of movement then it moves on to investigation. 

If after the full monitoring period there has been no movement generally they wouldnt bother spending time or money to try and workout why it had moved in the past. You could sink a fair amount of money and never find out especially if the prior cause of movement has already been fixed and the record of its fix has been lost over time. 

Its typically easier for a home owner to know about these things, landlords or commercial property owners (which HAs are technically) can go years between seeing the property, its often won't be the same person viewing it and its heavily dependent on tenants telling them what's going on whereas most people who see their home every day will spot problems and know if they are new or old. That said my mother claimed she had no idea of the existence of a 4' crack in the garage's outer wall when it was up for sale (an extension to the original building done before our purchasing it)