Insurance T&Cs longer than Animal Farm? No wonder no one’s reading them

This is going to sound so sad, but i do enjoy reading T&C’s, i love finding ones where it’s so hard to understand, you then contact the comapny with a screen shot on Twitter, the company have no idea, then it goes higher and higher up the ladder.

Then 9 times out of 10 the T&C’s will get changed, plus depending on what company it is, they will give you a “gesture of goodwill”. So really you get paid for your time, plus the company changes the T&C’s to help other customers. Win Win.

Like i say, i know it’s a sad hobby, but I like it 🙂

Actually, it sounds rather nice 🙂

This caused me to look at my insurance T&Cs. House is with John Lewis – 39 A5 pages including definitions, how to claim, who to contact etc. Written as tables of cover on the left, and exclusions on the right. Easy to follow if you read it – but unlikely you will unless you have to make a claim. Car with LV – 22 A5 pages again easy to follow. What struck me though is the necessity to be given the full information they provide; so many different types of claims and circumstances, that both insurer and insured need to have spelled out to avoid misunderstanding when the time comes.

However, you are unlikely to study the full T&Cs when buying a policy, and you might get a nasty surprise when your claim is turned down or reduced. What I would like to see is a set of basic standard terms for all policies – a national standard – that have to be part of all companies’ insurance policies so we don’t have to worry about small-print exclusions. Then individual companies can offer “enhancements” on top of the basic conditions if they wish.

My policies (like most I expect) come with a summary of the cover. Useful in some ways, but can be misleading when you have a claim and find the details in the full-length T&Cs don’t allow what you thought you were getting.

Nowadays it is not always easy to get hold of a hard copy of insurance policies, especially for buildings and contents cover it seems, yet they do exist and can be procured. The versions available free on line are usually scanned versions of the printed policy document and their presentation is rarely optimised for reading on a computer screen, or even for printing off because the pagination is often disordered depending on the format and the scaling sometimes distorts the layout. There are sometimes large empty spaces and blank pages in a document designed to be held in the hand rather than viewed on a monitor. In my view this is unacceptable given the premiums people pay for the policies.

I have gradually eased away from John Lewis in favour of Nationwide who seem to have a very clear style of presentation and use of plain English. John Lewis seemed to favour grey print on off-white paper but at least their terms were well-written and kept simple; they took a comprehensive approach to cover rather than splitting hairs over details but there was a price for that which in a brand new house under an NHBC warranty was not justified.