We bought our home in 2021, at the height of Covid 19, when there was a Stamp Duty break. We had lived here for 9 years, renting the property before we bought it from our landlord.
During the time we rented the house there weren’t any concerns with the structure of the building.
The Search done during conveyancing flagged up a record on the council’s database which simply states “U/PINNING & DRAINAGE“. The council have no other records about this. Nothing. I have contacted them twice, once before we bought the house, and in February of this years (2024).
I have read that an application for work can be submitted to the Building Regs folks and if the work is found to be unnecessary, the work that has been completed can be signed off (assuming it is up to the job). Therefore, it is completely possible that work to the drains was carried out but no underpinning was carried out and therefore there is no documentation to support it.
Our landlord had no knowledge of the record on the council’s database and had not heard of any underpinning carried out on the property. He had no documentation for it, at all. I don’t want to underplay this – our landlord spent significant time digging into their archives, their documentation for mortgages and remortgages and was coming up blank.
The landlord did have some work done on the garage in 2010, and that was to repair brickwork due to some cracks that appeared in the brickwork and this was thought to be due to the MOD replacing the flat roof on the garage with a pitched roof some years ago.
When we were buying the house we paid for a full survey and told the surveyor about the underpinning question – had the property been underpinned or not?
The surveyor carried out a thorough check and could not see anything that would suggest that the building had been repaired. Normally there would be visible signs in the brickwork, he said. There weren’t any then and there aren’t any now. He said the only way to be absolutely certain would be to get a structural engineer to excavate the ground around the property and check.
The cost to get a structural engineer to excavate the ground around all of the property to check for underpinning wasn’t questioned, but it is reasonable to imagine that it would be thousands, if not, tens of thousands.
Nine days after receiving the survey, and without providing details of it, we heard from the landlord. He had found some documentation dated at the time of the repairs listed on the council’s database and the documentation was for lintels above windows. Nothing to do with underpinning and there was no other documentation. Why would there be documentation for one thing and not the other?
As a group, our landlord, the solicitors representing them, our solicitor and us agreed that it was likely the council record was not correct and the likelihood of the underpinning having been carried out was unlilkely.
Our solicitor provided this information to our mortgage lender who accepted it.
We then proceeded to take out insurance and we played it as safe as we can, taking advice from the brokers that we spoke to about how to fill the application in, and we filled it in as instructed. We felt we had taken professional advice from as many people as we reasonably could. I’ll talk more about structural engineers later.
It is odd that Broker Direct PLC insurance chose not to accept this. The government says that if the application for insurance is completed to the best of the applicants knowledge that the application should be honoured. The Ombudsman says that if the applicant made a mistake and the insurance policy would not have been provided had the mistake have not been made, the insurance company can void the insurance policy. Those two statements don’t match each other.