Eight months after reporting a leak to our dwelling insurer, Hastings Direct, my husband and I and our two-year-old are nonetheless successfully homeless.
Final winter, we found {that a}n unnoticed leak beneath our fitted fridge-freezer had prompted intensive injury to the floorboards of our kitchen/front room.
Since then now we have skilled vital delays, poor communication and conflicting info, and what I consider is a failure by the insurer and its appointed contractors to correctly handle the declare.
A promised call-back by no means materialised as a result of name workers did not log the declare. Work lastly commenced greater than 5 months later.
The contractors eliminated all of the kitchen items, even though most have been undamaged and weren’t included within the schedule of works, and Hastings now desires us to contribute £8,000 to switch them.
There’s nonetheless no functioning kitchen within the property, which suggests we can’t return dwelling.
We initially agreed to maneuver into momentary lodging for what we have been instructed can be roughly two weeks. It’s now been practically three months.
The insurer solely authorises lodging in two-week increments, creating uncertainty about the place we’ll keep subsequent. We’ve got needed to pay for additional nursery periods for our daughter since we each must work at home, and the most recent momentary flat is simply too small to accommodate all of us.
We’ve got additionally needed to maintain our two cats in a cattery at our expense and, as a result of the kitchen is ill-equipped, now we have to depend on takeaways and prepared meals.
We nonetheless haven’t any clear timeline for when the work will likely be completed.
JS, Croydon
Hastings Direct readily admitted to me that on this event its service has fallen quick. You’ll be delighted to listen to that it’s “taking ahead studying” to enhance issues within the mild of your ordeal.
It attributes a few of the delays to the sudden extent of the injury, and a few to “points” with the contractors who’re managing the declare. The kitchen items and home equipment ought to by no means have been eliminated, it acknowledges.
So why have been you charged for his or her reinstatement? It was a “assertion” that was issued “prematurely”, it says, including that it might shoulder the price of the blunder as a “goodwill gesture”.
You contacted me in mid-June. Underneath stress from me, the corporate has now agreed a programme of repairs and an estimated timescale. It concurrently prolonged your lodging for a month to provide you some safety.
You hope to be again dwelling in per week’s time, and Hastings has agreed to supply an as-yet-unspecified quantity of compensation to replicate the misery prompted and to refund your nursery, cattery and different bills.
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