House insurance question

[mjr]

Try Ecclesiastical or NFU, especially if you are in a rural area. They have good reputations. As others have said, you must disclose all claims.

^^ This. If you keep buying from unethical but cheap insurers on comparison sites, they'll keep screwing people. Every householder who buys from them is "at fault"!

 

[glasgowcyclist]

Is it just me who is scratching my head at how a car can crash into a house and the house be at fault?

Was the house wearing hi-vis?
Well, there you go...

 

[Beebo]

Insurance is a financial contract. Why would anyone buy a financial contract without advice.
People used to buy insurance via a local high street broker who provided this advice.
But people didn't like paying for this extra service so now buy direct or via an aggregator site and are surprised when the product they buy isn't what they thought they had bought.

 

[Deleted member 26715]

much of the grumbling seems to be based on misconceptions and ignorance of what insurers are there to do and what policies actually do and don't cover.

No my grumbling about insurance, car specifically, is that it is a legal requirement & therefore controlled by the cartel

 

[midlife]

Insurance is a financial contract. Why would anyone buy a financial contract without advice.
People used to buy insurance via a local high street broker who provided this advice.
But people didn't like paying for this extra service so now buy direct or via an aggregator site and are surprised when the product they buy isn't what they thought they had bought.

I use an insurance broker, Keith Michaels Insurance. Great personal service from Gary and beats what I could get myself on the internet..

 

[Markymark]

I have dealt many tines with commercial insurance brokers and they can just as useless. I give them a list of insurance requirements and half the time when I check the insurance small print what the brokers have proposed is incorrect. The broker I've used for the last 5 years now always gets my businesses but it took a while to find her.

 

[srw]

No my grumbling about insurance, car specifically, is that it is a legal requirement & therefore controlled by the cartel

LOL

A cartel is a group of companies colluding to fix prices at a high level and to reduce competition. I'd be entertained by any evidence you might be able to find that any of that is true. You might start by considering that insurance is highly regulated by two different regulators, that the Competition and Markets Authority investigated as recently as 2015, that the private motor insurance market as a whole almost never makes a profit, and that barriers to entry are reasonably low.

[QUOTE 4902866, member: 9609"]I have a town centre commercial property that I arrange cover for, its a complicated one, there are times when I have went to the broker with a list of questions regarding the policy and they don't entirley understand how the policy stands and have needed to phone the insurer up to get clarification - so I would very much disagree that these policies are easy to understand, there is a lot of very ambiguous stuff in them[/QUOTE]
That's an advised sale. It's up to the broker to understand your needs and the policy on your behalf and make sure that it's fit for purpose for you. Most bog-standard motor and household policies these days are sold on a non-advised basis, which means that it's up to you to review the policy. Which in turn means that the insurer has an obligation to make the policy crystal clear to the average purchaser.

If you've got any evidence that a policy you've bought on a non-advised basis is unclear I'm sure the insurance company would be delighted* to entertain a complaint, and if you get no satisfaction there the Ombudsman will listen to you for free, and will charge the insurer for the privilege.

*if you pick the right insurance company I'm not joking - complaints are treated as free customer feedback from which the insurer can improve what it does.

 

[Beebo]

Insurance is a financial contract that sells itself as a social service.

There is a huge internal conflict between the marketing men who sell the product and the underwriters / claims teams that have to deliver on what has been sold to the public.

 

[srw]

Insurance is a financial contract that sells itself as a social service. No one should be fooled into thinking insurance companies are there to look after people and give them peace of mind; they are there solely to make money for themselves and their shareholders.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

Insurance companies are there to make money for themselves and their shareholders. The way of making money is by looking after people and giving them peace of mind.

In the same way bike manufacturers make money for their shareholders by selling people a useful mode of transport and/or some fun, and the publishers of literary fiction make money for their shareholders by distributing works of art and expanding people's mind. For as long as we have a mixed economy every private company exists to make money for its owners.

(And before anyone else does - declaration of interest. I work for an insurance company. I wouldn't do it if I didn't think there was some social good in doing it.)

 

[srw]

There is a huge internal conflict between the marketing men who sell the product and the underwriters / claims teams that have to deliver on what has been sold to the public.

In practice, less than you might think. Because the marketing teams need the good stories from the claims handling to sell.

 

[srw]

https://www.abi.org.uk/news/news-ar...-insurance-claims-and-average-payouts-rising/

The insurance industry pay out on 99% of motor claims, 87% of travel and 84% of household claims, paying over 3 million claims per year.

By the law of large numbers alone, even before I acknowledge that there are some mediocre (and worse) companies out there, there will be some screw-ups, some weaselling out of payments due and some inevitable bad publicity.

Anyone who doesn't want to buy insurance is free to do so - unless you decide to drive a motor vehicle. In which case for the sake of the rest of us it's a criminal offence just about worldwide to do so without insurance.

[edit]

I realise that expertise of any kind is unfashionable these days, but then I am rather old-fashioned.

 

[slowmotion]

https://www.abi.org.uk/news/news-ar...-insurance-claims-and-average-payouts-rising/

The insurance industry pay out on 99% of motor claims, 87% of travel and 84% of household claims, paying over 3 million claims per year.

By the law of large numbers alone, even before I acknowledge that there are some mediocre (and worse) companies out there, there will be some screw-ups, some weaselling out of payments due and some inevitable bad publicity.

Anyone who doesn't want to buy insurance is free to do so - unless you decide to drive a motor vehicle. In which case for the sake of the rest of us it's a criminal offence just about worldwide to do so without insurance.

[edit]

I realise that expertise of any kind is unfashionable these days, but then I am rather old-fashioned.

My van was stolen some time ago. Vanished into thin air. The Blue Book value for a vehicle in similar condition was £1800. The insurance company sent round a loss adjuster to visit me at home. A few days later, they offered me £600. The horse trading continued for a few iterations and I eventually settled for £1500.
I imagine that the loss adjuster was just sizing me up to see how desperate I was to get another van in a hurry. I bought another while the weaselling and wriggling continued.
Who was this insurance company? Some sole trader working out of a fly-blown office above a chip shop in Southend?
It was the Prudential, actually. Spare me your pleadings of saintliness.

 

[srw]

some time ago

Prudential

Yes, it would have been some time ago. The Pru stopped doing motor insurance about 15 years ago. Since when there have been at least two changes of regulator and the industry has spent a lot of time cleaning up its act.

You might not have noticed...

By the law of large numbers alone, even before I acknowledge that there are some mediocre (and worse) companies out there, there will be some screw-ups, some weaselling out of payments due and some inevitable bad publicity.

...that I'm not claiming saintliness. It's rather more complicated than that. But by and large it's a decently run industry looking to do the right thing by its customers.

 

[screenman]

My van was stolen some time ago. Vanished into thin air. The Blue Book value for a vehicle in similar condition was £1800. The insurance company sent round a loss adjuster to visit me at home. A few days later, they offered me £600. The horse trading continued for a few iterations and I eventually settled for £1500.
I imagine that the loss adjuster was just sizing me up to see how desperate I was to get another van in a hurry. I bought another while the weaselling and wriggling continued.
Who was this insurance company? Some sole trader working out of a fly-blown office above a chip shop in Southend?
It was the Prudential, actually. Spare me your pleadings of saintliness.

To be fair on the insurers, the book back then was miles out, it was not unusual to be trading cars at hundreds if not thousands behind book, there was a few that bucked that trend but not many. The books are closer now, with many cars at auction making well over book.

 

[srw]

This peace of mind thing is the aspect I have a problem with, in that I think it's a kind of misrepresentation. Insurance is sold to people as some kind of certainty, which I think is misleading. Buying insurance is like taking a gamble. Other financial services have to give warnings, 'Your investment may go up or down,' that kind of thing. I think insurance should do something similar - gamble if you like, and you can afford it, but you might lose.

Here, from the FCA, is what insurers and other financial services firms have to provide:

https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/fair-treatment-customers

Above all, customers expect financial services and products that meet their needs from firms they trust.

Consumer outcomes
There are six consumer outcomes that firms should strive to achieve to ensure fair treatment of customers. These remain core to what we expect of firms.

• Outcome 1: Consumers can be confident they are dealing with firms where the fair treatment of customers is central to the corporate culture.
• Outcome 2: Products and services marketed and sold in the retail market are designed to meet the needs of identified consumer groups and are targeted accordingly.
• Outcome 3: Consumers are provided with clear information and are kept appropriately informed before, during and after the point of sale.
• Outcome 4: Where consumers receive advice, the advice is suitable and takes account of their circumstances.
• Outcome 5: Consumers are provided with products that perform as firms have led them to expect, and the associated service is of an acceptable standard and as they have been led to expect.
• Outcome 6: Consumers do not face unreasonable post-sale barriers imposed by firms to change product, switch provider, submit a claim or make a complaint

In particular in this context - "Outcome 5: Consumers are provided with products that perform as firms have led them to expect, and the associated service is of an acceptable standard and as they have been led to expect."

We can all (me included) provide anecdotes of where all sorts of firms have provided services and products that are not as expected. The difference with regulated financial services compared with (say) train travel or supermarket shopping (or even government services) is that if you, the customer, believe that your insurance policy or bank account or investment account is not performing as you were led to expect you have a route to get redress.

The data for complaints and redress is published, and shows that nearly 3 million people complained in the second half of last year and got nearly £2bn of compensation. The largest set of complaints were in respect of PPI, which was a venal mis-selling scandal on behalf of the banking industry facilitated by insurers. Setting PPI to one side, over 2 million people complained and got £300m of compensation.

[edit]
Yes, I recognise there are two sides to this data. On the one hand, it demonstrates that there is an effective route for resolving problems. On the other hand, it demonstrates that there are many problems that need resolving. But it also shows that on average only one in fifteen people have an issue with a regulated financial product in a year that leads them to complain. And since that category includes everything from current accounts to credit cards to insurance to loans to mortgages to HP agreements to savings to pensions to ISAs that's a pretty small complaint ratio.