Contact the company that you have building insurance cover with. They will make contact with the council and any other relevant parties to ascertain whether there is a legitimate claim. The insurer is responsible for producing detailed reports to corroborate the claim. For legal reasons we cannot comment on any claim made against the council. Please direct any suspected claims to your insurer and not the council. The tree service will not have any direct contact the claimant. Islington council are signed up to a specific subsidence protocol for dealing with tree root claims called the joint mitigation protocol (jmp).

The responsibility for the maintenance and care of trees rests with the owner who may be liable for any claims for compensation, and you should contact them directly. If you believe the tree is causing subsidence, contact them directly. You must contact your own insurance company who will in turn provide arboricultural evidence about a particular tree, as well as structural evidence of building damage in support of any potential claim. In order to evaluate and decide the likely cause of damage due to subsidence, we require the following information: a structural report with a formal description of the damages positive tree root identification (necessary to identify the species and location of any trees involved). http://3b8.s3-website.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com/damage-loss-claim/subsidence-damage-loss-claim/Subsidence-everything-you-need-to-know.html

What is buildings insurance?

Subsidence investigation, remedial design and control subsidence - ground and foundation movement with associated damage subsidence has in recent years become very much associated with buildings insurance claims. In particular since 1971 when cover for subsidence within household policies was generally introduced. Buildings insurance policies cover a number of insured events, which together with subsidence should be defined within the terms of the insurance policy. Those associated with subsidence normally include heave, landslip and water damage (typically leakage from below ground drainage or water supply services). These events may be all encompassed as events or causes.

Subsidence should be covered by your buildings insurance , which means your home insurer should pick up the bill for any damage it causes to your home.

Will all buildings insurance cover subsidence?

It is troubling that courts rely on first-party insurance earth movement exclusions to interpret a third-party subsidence exclusion. In such cases, there is seemingly no recognition of the fundamentally different purpose of each policy. While first-party policies are concerned with the causes of loss, liability policies are concerned not only with the causes but also who caused the loss. Liability policies pay only when an insured has a legal obligation to pay. Absent legal liability, the insurer is not obligated to pay—regardless of whether the loss may be a covered event. It should be obvious, then, that a subsidence exclusion attached to a cgl policy is intended by the insurer to apply only if an insured is legally obligated to pay for the results of the subsidence.

The experience of our peril specific team is market leading. We are the only law firm who runs a team focusing solely on subsidence recovery and liability claims. Our team is comprised of paralegals up to partners meaning we have the resource to service low value/high volume claims all the way up to bespoke multi million pound claims. We work with a significant number of clients across the insurance and public sector and have an in-depth understanding of our clients’ needs such that we can provide a service which is of most benefit to our clients’ business. We position ourselves in line with our clients’ own teams in order to provide a seamless service to our clients and our clients’ customers.

Please note: due to the high volume of claims we are dealing with and partly due to the pandemic, we are not currently taking on new clients for subsidence claims. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. We hope to rectify this problem as soon as we can. Subsidence issues are often the most technically challenging type of insurance claim. This is why we have a specialist subsidiary company that deals exclusively with property defects such as subsidence. When your home or business suffers from subsidence damage, the loss on your property will require a specialised understanding of subsidence damage to fully ensure the scope of potential damage can be calculated.

The term “subsidence” can be enough to strike fear into the minds of some property owners, however, in reality, a large proportion of insurance claims made for subsidence damage are subsequently found after specialist investigation to be due to a much less severe cause. Subsidence, where it relates to building structures, is often misunderstood. A typical insurance definition of subsidence is – “the downward movement of the ground upon which the building is founded for reasons unconnected to the loading of the ground from the building. ”subsidence is the independent downward movement of the ground below a building causing the soil beneath the foundations to become unstable, the affected section of the building then consequently drops causing structural cracks.