Buyers indemnity insurance

[TheBaneOfLife]

House sale plodding along and we are at the enquiries stage...

Told the solicitor to send them to me and I'll deal with it.

Reading through and see they're asking for a £350 allowance for indemnity insurance because of the decking which confused me.

we originally rented the house, put up the decking in the garden 2019 because its hugely sloped and we gained back some level ground from doing so, so naturally one end is at about waist height. We bought the house in 2020 over a year after it was put up.

Now to realise we should of had planning permission as its more than 30cm above the ground BUT as we've had no objections or enforcement action, were covered by the 4 year rule (not 10 as it was completed before april 24) so we could get apply for a certificate of lawfullness, providing the council accept our evidence of time stamped photos and Google earth historical imagery.

So technically buyers don't need indemnity insurance because there's no risks of enforcement because were covered by the 4 year rule, however id imagine obtaining the certificate will take time and cause delays we don't want.

We are desperate to move and on track to comple within weeks, im leaning toward just sucking it up and paying out the 350.

WWYD?

If you’re desperate to move I would just suck up the £350 for the insurance. (I had similar lack
of planning permission issues on a house I was purchasing, sellers refused to get the certificate as said it was unnecessary so I pulled out of the purchase. I viewed it that I was potentially taking on a whole load of planning hassle from the seller because they didn’t do the proper paperwork).

Indemnity policies are conveyancings solution to making minor, practically non-existent, problems go away.

Everybody involved knows there is no chance whatsoever that the policy is ever going to be claimed on.

But the conveyancer acting for the buyer isn't prepared to say "look, don't worry about the decking, it's been there 6 years, nobody cares, the council aren't going to take any enforcement action."

So, in order to give everyone some protection against something that is never going to happen an indemnity policy is taken out. And those involved are happy to suck up the cost because compared to the value of the property it's tiny.

If the policies were thousands of pounds it would be different, but they're cheap enough that nobody makes much of a fuss.

I'm convinced there's a PPI style scandal that will hit in a few years time!

It doesn’t sound like the indemnity is needed, and indemnity policies are pretty worthless anyway. However to keep the sale on track you’ll probably have to suck it up and agree. Although you could try arguing the case with the solicitor.

Assuming your buyer’s getting a mortgage, I wouldn’t bother arguing with this. The mortgage lender’s conditions probably require indemnity insurance in these circumstances and the fees and time for the buyer’s solicitor to try to get the lender’s permission to go ahead without insurance is unlikely to be worth it.

This probably won’t be the buyer pushing it. We had to ask for indemnity insurance for something in the house we were buying that didn’t have building regs. We were planning on removing it immediately, and it wasn’t something that raised safety concerns, so we didn’t care - we had it out within 2 weeks of moving in. But our solicitor insisted because our lender required it. So if the seller had argued, there wasn’t anything we could do.

Thanks, that was the route we are leaning towards, just the enquiries to go on our new house and I think thats everything else done so we can get on and exchange.

Although something even more ridiculous popped up on our searches, house MIGHT be subject to some medival law with paying for the upkeep of the parish church, so we have the option to do nothing and take the risk, pay 100 plus vat for a search to see if its even going to be affected or pay 19 indemnity insurance which they'll charge up 50 plus vat to put in place. Never bloody ending🙄

The chancel charge insurance is now a thing because a a few years ago a couple got stung for £300k for a church roof. I’ve had to buy chancel insurance for 3 houses and I don’t know if the charges are for parish churches still in existence or long since gone monasteries as a significant amount of land was monastic land at some point in the past.
I think you may be able to purchase the policy direct.

I totally agree, it's a complete racket.

Oh yeah my parents had that church thing. And there was something about how they couldn’t look into it to see if they’d need to pay for the upkeep, because if you look into it and find that you do need to, you then can’t get the indemnity insurance.

And they had to pay for something because there was a covenant restricting extending the property in any way. And they’d added solar panels, which add to the outline of the roof. I mean, the chance that the developers from fucking decades ago are going to come back and take action against every single person who has done anything like that to their house is so minuscule. It’s a complete racket. But it’s relatively small amounts to pay, so people put up with it.