Car Insurance Question RE "locked boot"

rs65 wrote: »

Mine says similar but must be hidden from view in a closed glove compartment or locked boot.

Nothing there about it being isolated from the car.

Your interpretation would exclude all SUVs and hatchbacks and even saloons with split rear seats. I don't think that is the intention.

The intention is to avoid claims for belongings left on the seat, in view or in a luggage compartment without the shelf in place.

Thanks for the reply. I agree the intention of the claim wording is not to exclude certain types of car and to avoid having people claim for silly things like leaving a purse/wallet in open view. But as I have replied, the wording of the policy does not mention a luggage compartment or shelf - it simply says locked boot, like yours. I suspect that this language has never been challenged as the reasonable interpretation is as you have said. However, due to what has happened I am looking for anything to try and use for the challenge.

I could go into a lot more ranty detail but I suspect this is not the right place to do so

Thanks for all the replies. I wanted to clarify some points as I fear that the reason I'm asking this might be misconstrued somewhat.

To be clear - I am not trying to find a loophole in order to claim against my policy because of me doing something clearly and obviously out of the policy requirements. For instance, I can clearly see why I would not be able to claim if I had left a bag on full display on the front seat or something similar.

My contention is that I had a bag that had been put into the rear footwell (i.e. behind the driver's seat) that was covered by clothing (I can see why this is problematic). The bag was not visible from the outside of the car as it was covered. Also (and again I can see why some of the following points are problematic): a. I have privacy glass round the entire back windows of the car, b. we were parked in a car park under a 5 star hotel in a very posh part of London, c. the car park is run by a reputable company that should have had attendants on the premises and d. was parked near the attendants office with motion detecting lights in the car park so any movement should have been picked up.

It turns out that the attendant (only one is on per night) are shared amongst 7 other car parks in the area so they are never actually present in any given car park unless there is a specific reason to do so (i.e. someone's car is broken into, or a homeless person is sleeping in the lift). The CCTV is only pointed at the car park payment machine - there are no other cameras. The local police have repeatedly asked the car park owners to guard their car park as many people have had their cars broken into (we only found this out when we had the police officer contact us after the event) and, more worryingly, the police know enough about what has been happening to have a complete idea of the MO of the people doing the break-ins (i.e. the criminals know the shift patterns of the attendants, they know the vans that drop the attendants off at the start of their shifts etc) AND the police know the MO of attack - they only go for cars where the engine is warm as they know that the occupants have recently left the car and will not be back for a while. They do not target based on contents - they are speculative (i.e. they break into anything with a warm bonnet in the hopes of finding something).

This is why I am trying to find something - anything - to contest this, as I feel that even if I had a partition boot with no ingress potential from the main body of the car I would still have been a target. The police officer said as much in his communication with me, as did the attending officers on the night - basically, wrong place wrong time. They still would have smashed the back window and rooted through the car (and obviously then be able to gain access to the boot from the main car with a boot release switch or similar) no matter what as they knew they could get away with it as there were no attendants and no risk of us coming back within a short time period. As I can't (to my knowledge) easily claim liability from the car park company (as they have the disclaimers that they bear no responsibility etc etc), I am looking to see if there is any way I can get the insurance company to look at my case again.

I appreciate that I may be grasping at straws, and apologies if I have confused anyone. I am not naive enough to think that I have found some never before seen loophole in my policy, and I am not trying to get a situation where I can sue someone for millions. I am just immensely frustrated that it appears that my insurance policy is rather worthless when I needed it most (I have seen that other insurers, such as Hiscox, do not seem to have the same exceptions in their policy - and yes, I will be moving my policy over to them if that is the case).

Once again, thank you all for the information and the pointers towards further information. I may not be able to do anything about this and have to accept that I have basically been a bit of an idiot, but at the same time I feel very aggrieved that this situation could have been easily mitigated by the car park company simply spending a little bit of money to ensure their security was up to scratch.