Some Tessa savers will be disappointed at their final payout after five years of committed saving. They have watched rates fall from the 14 per cent offered by many Tax-Exempt Special Savings Accounts at launch to the current 7 per cent or so. On the other side is investment in shares, more risky but providing, in the long term, better performance.Between, investors want and need access to a type of investment which will achieve more than bank and building society deposits, but does not involve as much risk as investing in shares.The return on deposits has certainly been in the spotlight recently with millions of Tessa savers waiting for their accounts to mature. These tax-free investments are offered by nearly 30 unit trust managers, and attracted more than pounds 450m of new money between July and December last year. Private investors are attracted to corporate-bond funds because they are able to fill what was something of a hole in the UK investment landscape.
On one side of the spectrum are bank and building society deposits which form the bedrock of personal savings. They also look set to attract a significant chunk of the money earmarked for PEPs prior to the end of the tax year in April.

CORPORATE-BOND personal equity plans (PEPs) have been the biggest story in the unit trust industry for the past six months. Our policy has been to accept such claims if it looks like the home owner might become piggy in the middle, and then go back to the household insurer to recover some or all of the money.”The NHBC said that the close involvement of its inspectors enabled it to assess the insured risk properly and intervene early if mistakes were made.. In turn, the NHBC claims the problem lies with the building insurers.”We have found a hardening attitude among insurers towards acceptance of subsidence claims in relatively new homes,” a spokeswoman said.”They can be hard to convince that there are sometimes inherent soil features that could cause damage to a new home despite the very best efforts of the builder, engineers and NHBC experts. “It is a competent, well-organised and professional organisation, but it can make mistakes.”Mr Harris said that in practice the NHBC was no more to blame than general insurers, which were minimising their pay-outs on subsidence damage after years of heavy losses.Some building insurers are privately very critical of NHBC.

He nevertheless believes the NHBC has fulfilled an important role in raising building standards.”Its standards are a credit to the house building industry and contribute to gradual improvement,” said Mr Clancy. Mr Eaves would now recommend people in comparable situations to put in simultaneous claims to both insurers.Brian Clancy, a vice-president of the Institute of Structural Engineers, said many home-owners were passed backwards and forwards between the NHBC and building insurers. The builder argued that the work was guaranteed by the NHBC while the latter rejected the claim on the grounds that the damage to the property did not meet the criteria for “major structural damage”.”The warranty only covers major problems, which are bloody disasters to the man on the street,” said Bob Eaves, a surveyor and director of DTZ Debenham Thorpe.The floor sank in Mr Eaves’s own new home but after six months struggling to persuade the NHBC to foot the bill, he gave up and his building insurer paid. In one of Mr Harris’s recent cases, a pounds 500,000 development in Maidstone was overseen by the NHBC.But in the opinion of Mr Harris, the work was substandard. If work was later shown to have gone wrong, he argued that there may be problems in obtaining full disclosure if one section had been critical of another.This view is shared by Alan Harris, principal of CSC, a claimants adviser, which puts pressure on building insurers and the NHBC until one or other accepts liability for subsidence claims on new properties. In addition to its role as an insurer, the NHBC is permitted by law to act as the building inspector in place of the local authority.Mr Hall said there was a risk that the NHBC’s inspection section could yield to pressure from builders to issue guarantees in situations where it should demand work be done again. Mr Hall said he was worried that home-owners may lose out because of what he regards as conflicts of interest within NHBC.