Is your insurer asking you to jump through hoops?

This a consequence of wafer-thin margins due to excessive concentration on the premium in contrast to cover and claims handling. My only recent claim experience was on a travel policy with John Lewis Insurance. The claim was handled speedily, without demurring or prevaricating, and was accepted in full. Possibly not the cheapest insurance but peace of mind isn’t negotiable. The firms that make people – who are already distressed enough by the loss – go through the hoops and over the hurdles, with a water-splash finish on the final lap, should be named and shamed. Obviously, insurers have to protect themselves against inflated claims and fraud but they could do more to check the situation before issuing cover.

Incidentally, this demonstrates another benefit of ordering groceries on-line for delivery; at least we’ve got an audit trail of previous orders with Sainsbury’s so there should be no arguments over the freezer contents.

My mother’s chimney, shared with a neighbour, was damaged in a storm which affected a number of houses around, and our claim on her behalf was rejected on grounds of lack of evidence of maintenance of the chimney. What do you do to maintain a chimney in a brick-built terrace house, go up and grease it every couple of years? We didn’t have evidence of regular roof inspections, though they had been done every couple of years in the past few years, and didn’t bother to challenge the insurers (Legal and General). We’ve since changed insurers and fixed the chimney during other work.

But I’m not sure that roof inspections would necessarily have looked at the shared chimney, or recorded any acceptable evidence of good condition. Roofers tend to be men of few words.

“To claim for damages for breach of contract, for breach of an express
term providing for funding of legal expenses on occasion of an insured
event, with respect to issue of third-party proceedings in accordance
with the Terms and Conditions set out in the Contract of Insurance
(Home Insurance Policy) imposed, entered into or otherwise agreed
between both the contracting parties.”

Am looking for a direct-access lawyer who will do it on the CFA…..
failing which may have to do it myself, generous Limitation period
still prevailing, as against my insurers.

When an unfortunate lady backed into my car in the dark in a supermarket car park, and thankfully owned up, what I thought was my insurance company, M & S, handed the case over to one of the firms that are once or twice removed from the actual insurers. They wanted to collect my car, on a transporter, drive it to a holding pound which on enquiring turned out to be 300 miles away, leave it there to be assessed taking heaven knows how long, and then take it to a garage of their choosing. Please be aware that a courtesy car is never offered until the assessment is completed because if the car is a write-off no courtesy car is ever allowed as it is the repairing garage who provides it at their cost not the insurers. My car was a Nissan and bought from a large local (20minutes away) dealership and repairers. In all the conversations I was being pressurised into letting this unknown company take my car out of my control. What they were proposing, I worked out, could have cost me £3.500 if they eventually wriggled out of paying my claim and I would have had no way of getting my car back. Their actions seemed to be primarily to make large sums of money for the transporting companies, their signed up garages and possibly from me. It could all be done much cheaper by my local official Nissan garage (who were horrified by these shenanigans). I was very uneasy and very stressed, not being used to having accidents to contend with, so I queried everything, agreed to nothing, and rang the M&S number again to ask what was going on. They had a very nice customer assistance lady who was very sorry and said of course I could use my own garage to assess the damage, quote, and when agreed, repair the car. From then on it all ran smoothly. A courtesy car was provided and all was fixed within a week.
When a follow up call from M&S came to find out if I was happy (!) with the way the claim had been handled I said it was certainly not worthy of their company for customers to be treated so shamefully and put under such stress. I think they have taken it on board but I am now with Tesco who, should I be unlucky again, I hope will behave properly and with more consideration.