claims history treated differently by insurers

MarcoM

Hello there,

I am currently insured with one company for our buildings + contents insurance. When i took out our policy I told the call centre agent that when we were in between properties for six months we had our contents stored in one of these storage places where you pay a rent and take out an insurance in your name. The storage depot suffered a pipe burst and we had to claim.
The current home insurer told us that this would increase the premium which it did.

Now at renewal i've disclosed this claim to other insurers who have told me there is not even need for me to disclose this as it was not a claim on our home insurance (in fact we did not have a home).
For this reason i am a little bit upset with my current insurer.
I'd be grateful if you could give me your opinion on the following:

a) is the fact that one insurer has logged this claim on our home policy likely to cause problems if in the future we were to claim on our renewed home insurance, basically would the fact that one previous insurer had considered the storage claim relevant to our claims history potentially cause issues in the future even though a new insurer tells us that they are not interested in this claim?

b) do i have recourse via complaint to obtain a refund against my current insurer? I suppose it is possible that an overzealous call centre agent could have made the wrong assumption when i told them about the storage claim.

Any advice would be appreciated.

thanks

MM

raskazz

Each insurer will have its own view on the matter. There is no 'standard' underwriting procedure for such an incident, so it is up to the individual insurer to use their judgement to decide whether to use the incident as a means of rating the premium.

The answer to (a) is that as long as you have disclosed the incident to your new insurer there will not be any problems. Whether they decide to load the premium for the incident is up to them, but as long as you've informed them of the facts accurately then there's not an issue.

As far as (b) is concerned, I don't think you have much of a case. Their argument (and the commonsense argument) will be that if you didn't like the quoted premium you should not have accepted the policy. It might be worth enquiring with them, but I wouldn't hold high expectations of any benefit in doing so.