What is Chancel Repair Liability?
If you are in the process of purchasing a property or a piece of land, a vital conveyancing report to have carried out is a Chancel Check Report. A Chancel Check Report checks to see if the property or land in question has a Chancel Repair Liability attached to it. This is a law dating back to medieval times when the country was under the reign of Henry VIII. Chancel Repair Liability was the monarch’s decision to dissolve the monasteries when he made himself the supreme head of the Church of England in 1534 and he imposed that churches were to be maintained by wealthy land owners.
Since then, the large estates of land have been broken down and developed into multiple private residences however, the Chancel Repair Liability has been passed down to the new properties. This law benefits around 5,200 pre-reformation churches in England and Wales and under the Land Registration Act 1925, Chancel Repair Liability is classified as an overriding interest in registered land. This means Chancel Repair Liability still exists without the land being registered.
What is a Chancel Check Report? 
The reason why a Chancel Check Report is such an important conveyancing report is because Chancel Repair Liability means that property owners could be liable to pay for repairs to the local church and bills could potentially run into tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds. Some vicars call it a godsend but it has been known that a Chancel Repair has cost one couple over £200,000 towards the upkeep of their parish church. These homeowners are called lay rectors and if they had purchased a Chancel Check Report before purchasing the property they would have been aware of this potentially devastating law.
It is estimated that Chancel land accounts for 40% of all land in England and Wales but there is no single central register which can be used to identify all Chancel Repair Liabilities. NLIS can provide you with a Chancel Check Report where the property or deeds for a piece of land are checked along with the Land Registry and current landowners for relevant information. A search of the records will help to identify the likelihood of Chancel Liability in respect of a given property or pieve of land as well as the proportion of the total cost to be paid in respect of each liable area. However, the actual amount to be paid cannot be known until repairs are carried out on the church and the costs established.
You can purchase a Chancel Check Report from NLIS which informs you if the property or land you are looking to purchase is liable for Chancel Repair. There are two different outcomes when a Chancel Check Report has been purchased. The first is a certificate which puts the purchaser/vendor in the clear because there is no Chancel Repair Liability on the property or land in question and the second report confirms that there is a real potential to be held liable for Chancel Repairs. If this is the case, insurance can then be purchased from NLIS to cover the owner of the property in the event of a Chancel Repair Liability claim.
