‘We can see into the other room’: insurers face surge in subsidence claims
Monitoring devices were only recently fitted, about a year after they first submitted the claim, and they have no idea when the damage might start to be repaired.They are among a growing number of UK homeowners who face subsidence after two record-hot summers. August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded around the world. Signs of subsidence include widening and lengthening diagonal cracks, typically around window and door frames, as well as sloping floors, and sticking doors and windows.Millions of homes are at risk of subsidence because of the worsening climate crisis, the British Geological Survey has warned.
- ▪Monitoring devices were only recently fitted, about a year after they first submitted the claim, and they have no idea when the damage might start to be repaired.They are among a growing number of UK homeowners who face subsidence after two
- ▪August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded around the world.
- ▪Signs of subsidence include widening and lengthening diagonal cracks, typically around window and door frames, as well as sloping floors, and sticking doors and windows.Millions of homes are at risk of subsidence because of the worsening cl
The Guardian — UK publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under news. We currently carry 357 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — UK |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/12/subsidence-uk-insurers-double-surge-claims-hot-summers |
| Publication time | Sat, 12 Sep 2026 10:00:30 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-12T10:12:51.016Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-12T10:12:51.016Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | xTEs7ATkQLNV · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A crack in Melissa's 1901 home in Walthamstow, north London, is big enough to hold a pencil.View image in fullscreenA crack in Melissa's 1901 home in Walthamstow, north London, is big enough to hold a pencil.Insurance industry‘We can see into the other room’: insurers face surge in subsidence claimsStressed UK homeowners tell of cracks opening up in the walls around them after two record-hot summersJulia KolleweSat 12 Sep 2026 06.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on Google“We’ve got one wall with an absolutely huge diagonal crack, through which we can see through to the other room; you could easily put your fingers in it and chunks of plaster are falling off,” says Henry Biggs, 49, from Stroud in Gloucestershire.He and his partner started noticing cracks in their family home in June 2025, a…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — UK.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Guardian — UK
