Legal and General Building and Contents

[caro]

The good thing that I can say for Legal and General is that there seems to be no quibble about replacing goods on a new for old basis, and it looks as though repairs will also be done, so what's the problem you may ask.

Loss adjusters and contractors. Getting anything done. An absolute nightmare. After 2 months a grand total of 5 hours has been spent on our house, and they haven't even taken out all of the wet material. I've probably spent longer on the phone pushing for anything to be done, and finally they agreed to a surveyor taking a look. He agreed much more needed to be done and was going to do a report. Trouble is he went on emergency leave without submitting the report and no-one know when he'll be back. The loss adjustor handling our claim is on 2 weeks holiday, and so is his assistant, who said I should deal with the surveyor in their absence. We think we're changing to a contractor who is dealing with other flood victims in the area, but the surveyor was dealing with that so we aren't sure. The letting agent for the house Legal and General are renting for us wanted to start showing people round who want to move in when our contract ends on 22 September. It took me over a week to get anyone to agree that our house would not be habitable by then and the contract needed extending.

To be fair to Legal and General, when I've gone to them in desperation, they have dealt with issues for us, but the loss adjusters are employed by them, and they employ the contractors. We don't like the standard of work of the contractors that we hope to change to, but at least they are around and working every day, unlike ours.

We're lucky. My husband and I aren't backwards in coming forward, and can be assertive. My husband is a carpenter, so he knows what he's talking about and looking for in the building work and will make sure it's done to a good standard, although he'll probably have to do a lot himself to be sure of that.

What about people less confident than us, or those without insurance? We have a friend who's a widow, and her house has had even less done than ours. She's also with Legal and General. If it's still like this for us after 2 months, I pity the poor souls who are just starting out. I realise the companies are all busy, but you'd think they'd be trying to clear older claims to make way for those coming through.

I dread to think when this nightmare will end.

To end on a positive note, we finally took delivery of our replacement lawnmower this week, so after 8 weeks my husband has cut our lawns, which have been growing very well with all the "fertiliser" they had. You can't believe what an achievement that feels like and how difficult that has been. I can't imagine how we'll feel when we get our house and our lives back too.