Mining Subsidence Damage Claims in Barnsley

Two doors, and knocking on the wrong one costs months

If your house has cracked and you think the ground is involved, there are two entirely separate routes and they do not connect to each other.

The insurance route: subsidence is normally an insured peril on a buildings policy. You notify your insurer, they appoint a loss adjuster and usually their own engineer, and the policy responds subject to its excess - which for subsidence is typically substantial.

The mining route: coal mining subsidence damage falls under a statutory scheme rather than your policy. It runs on notice of the damage to the Mining Remediation Authority, formerly the Coal Authority, who investigate and, where the damage is accepted as mining-related, arrange remedial works or a payment in lieu.

Notifying your insurer for what turns out to be mining damage, or opening a mining claim for what turns out to be a failed lintel, both waste months and neither is cheap in a live house sale. Establishing the cause first is what determines which door you knock on.

What the statutory route involves

In outline: damage is notified, the Authority investigates and decides whether it accepts the damage as caused by coal mining subsidence, and if it does, a schedule of remedial works follows.

Two practical points that people find out too late. The scheme has time limits and they are not generous, so a crack you have been watching for years is worth acting on rather than continuing to watch. And you are entitled to take your own advice - the investigating engineer in that process is not acting for you, and where the sums are meaningful an independent assessment is a reasonable thing to have alongside it.

None of this is a reason to be adversarial. Most claims are handled straightforwardly. It is a reason to understand who is acting for whom.

What mining damage looks like, and what it usually is instead

Genuine mining subsidence tends to affect a whole structure rather than one corner, often with a directional character, and there is frequently evidence over a wider area than a single property - which is why neighbours comparing notes is more informative here than almost anywhere.

But the honest position in this district, stated plainly: most of the cracking we are asked to look at is not mining. The colliery-era housing produces its own defects with far more regularity, and they are all cheaper to deal with than a ground problem:

• Wall tie corrosion in the interwar and post-war cavity stock, giving regular horizontal cracking at consistent spacing
• Deflecting or failed lintels over openings
• Thermal movement at junctions and in long unrelieved runs of brickwork
• Chimney breasts removed at some point with nothing supporting the stack
• Leaking drains washing fines out from beneath a foundation - which mimics subsidence closely, is local, and is comparatively cheap to fix
• Historic settlement, particularly where a house sits on or near made ground, which happened long ago and finished

What an independent engineer's assessment does

It answers the question the whole process turns on: what actually caused this, and is it still happening. That is done by evidence rather than by assertion - damage classified against the BRE Digest 251 categories, a desk study of the mining records and historic mapping, drainage testing because washout is common and cheap to rule out, monitoring across a full seasonal cycle where a single visit cannot settle it, and trial pits where the foundations need proving.

Where the conclusion is mining, that report is the evidence that opens the statutory route. Where it is not, it usually saves you from a claim that would have been declined - and tells you what to fix instead.

We do not carry out remedial works and take no commission from anyone who does, which matters in a process where several of the other parties have an interest in the outcome. A structural survey and report is a fixed £580 + VAT, with the report inside 10 working days of the inspection, guaranteed.

If you are buying in a former pit village

Read the coal mining report in the searches rather than filing it - it will tell you what is recorded beneath the property and whether there is a history of subsidence claims at that address.

A previous mining claim is not a reason to walk away. A property where damage was investigated, accepted, repaired and documented is frequently in a better evidenced position than the one next door where nobody ever looked. What lenders and buyers react badly to is uncertainty, not history.