Previous repairs caused a new leak after Mary’s ten-year buildings warranty term was up. Should she have been offered compensation?
What happened
When Mary bought her house, it came with a ten-year buildings warranty. In the tenth year, a leak started to come through the ceiling, so she contacted her warranty provider to get it fixed.
Six months later, water started to come through the ceiling again. Mary told her warranty provider, but it said there was nothing more it could do because her warranty had ended.
Mary had an independent report done, and it showed that the warranty provider hadn’t repaired the leak correctly the first time. Its engineer had damaged the pipes that were now leaking. Mary showed this to her warranty provider, but it still refused to do anything else.
Mary got another report, which also said that the previous repair works had caused the new leak. When the warranty provider looked at the second report, it agreed to fix the pipes and damage to the ceiling. Though she finally got her repairs, Mary felt like she deserved compensation.
For almost six months, Mary had to deal with the issue alone. She didn’t have the money to fix it herself and had to empty a bucket of water that collected in her living room daily. She didn’t feel she could go away and didn’t know if it was safe for people to come and visit her.
When her warranty provider refused to offer compensation, Mary came to us.
What we said
Mary didn’t have the funds to repair the issue herself. And we felt the warranty provider had missed several opportunities to handle the claim, but had dismissed the information she presented. So, we told the warranty provider to repay Mary any money she’d spent on reports.
But we also wanted to address the way the warranty provider had handled the claim. The leak had been distressing and had caused Mary a lot of disruption to her daily life over many months. She hadn't been able to see her grandchildren or invite other friends over while she still had the leak.
She'd also gone to great effort to arrange the two reports. And there had been a significant amount of correspondence back and forth to try and get the business to accept liability for the damage.
Taking everything into account we recommended the warranty provider pay Mary £1,000 in compensation to reflect the substantial impact its mistakes had caused.