LLoyds Bank - Home emergency cover - a con!

lottie748

I apologise for the long post!

I have a Lloyds Bank Premier Account for which I pay £25 a month. One of the benefits is their Home Emergency Cover.

Last friday night I had a blocked drain - the manhole just just outside my dining room was over-flowing with raw sewage, it was disgusting....

I checked my Home Emergency Cover details......

Blurb from the account benefits highlights:
Home Emergency Cover from RSA and Home serve worth up to £100 a year - fast professional help for household emergencies.

The more detailed blurb from the website:
Added Value Accounts - Home Emergency Cover

As a Premier Account customer you get free access to a 24 hour call-out service to help you sort out domestic emergencies at home* - a blocked drain, damaged roof, or a failure of household services such as electricity, hot water or central heating system. Central heating cover is available from 1 October to 30 April (inclusive).
Under our Home Emergency Cover we will arrange for reliable trades people to be sent to your home to deal with those household emergencies.

Additional blurb from the detailed Premier Accounts "guide to benefits booklet":



Your Home Emergency policy covers you for emergencies involving:

• Failure of or damage to your home's plumbing and drainage

Hooray I thought :j - so I called the Home Emergency cover to be told that my policy didn't cover this as the problem was not inside the house. :mad:

Indeed when I checked - it does say:
Emergencies outside your home are not covered.

So in the end I had to call out emergency drain services and it cost me £114 to be cleared.

So I would really like your thoughts on the below:
Fair enough the manhole cover to the sewage pipe is outside the house (by 6 inches) - but surely (without going into too much detail) the cause for the blockage happened inside the house.....

Also how can they justify highlighting "blocked drains" in their promotional leaflets/website how many houses have their main drains inside?? Do they just mean a blocked sink then? How would that be an emergency?!

I feel that at the very least they have over-sold and mis-represented their offer. Would I have any come-back on this or a case to write to the ombudsman?

I will be changing my bank account now to a very basic one - this is the second time one of the so-called benefits has failed to deliver.

Thanks for your thoughts and advice.

Lottie

InsideInsurance

It isnt an indemnity based policy and so the fact that the problem may have originated from inside of the property makes no difference.

As you say, drains can also mean sinks, baths, washing machines etc and so their marketing is correct.

Many of these "free" insurances are heavily limited either in their terms or the strict application of them. Ultimately you can register a complaint and threaten the FOS if they dont reimburse you but your only possible arguement is that the exception is too heavily buried in the documentation and to be honest I doubt you will get anywhere

slopemaster

Thanks for the warning!
I think that any normal person would take 'drains' to be external, and agree with you that this seems to be deliberate misrepresentation.

I would definitely complain - though, as the previous poster says you may not get anywhere. Is the 'not outside your house' highlighted in the key facts?

lottie748

Thanks both for your prompt replies. The "not outside your house" was highlighted in the key facts - but I guess I assumed "drains" would be covered as they promoted it so heavily.

However.... an update to the story is that I have now complained to "Morethan" who are the providers of this home emergency cover for Lloyds. If I provide the invoice for work, they will reimburse me the cost as I was without toilet facilities and water (couldn't use anything that ran into the drain) for the duration. Also given another hour the sewage would probably have come into the house. They say I should have emphasized this.

So, it was worth making the complaint - however I do still think there is a really grey area about what is inside and outside a house and what constitutes a drain!

rs65

Glad you got it sorted but I think they have taken the 'outside the home' too literally. I would've thought that the home extends to the boundaries of the home not just the structure of the house.

The welcome pack booklet doesn't seem to mention the 'outside' bit.

http://www.lloydstsb.com/media/lloydstsb2004/pdfs/premier_account_welcome_pack.pdf

It covers lost keys - are they suggesting the cover only applies if you lose them in the house.

ihateyes

lottie748 wrote: »

I apologise for the long post!

I have a Lloyds Bank Premier Account for which I pay £25 a month. One of the benefits is their Home Emergency Cover.

Last friday night I had a blocked drain - the manhole just just outside my dining room was over-flowing with raw sewage, it was disgusting....

I checked my Home Emergency Cover details......

Blurb from the account benefits highlights:
Home Emergency Cover from RSA and Home serve worth up to £100 a year - fast professional help for household emergencies.

The more detailed blurb from the website:
Added Value Accounts - Home Emergency Cover

As a Premier Account customer you get free access to a 24 hour call-out service to help you sort out domestic emergencies at home* - a blocked drain, damaged roof, or a failure of household services such as electricity, hot water or central heating system. Central heating cover is available from 1 October to 30 April (inclusive).
Under our Home Emergency Cover we will arrange for reliable trades people to be sent to your home to deal with those household emergencies.

Additional blurb from the detailed Premier Accounts "guide to benefits booklet":



Your Home Emergency policy covers you for emergencies involving:

• Failure of or damage to your home's plumbing and drainage

Hooray I thought :j - so I called the Home Emergency cover to be told that my policy didn't cover this as the problem was not inside the house. :mad:

Indeed when I checked - it does say:
Emergencies outside your home are not covered.

So in the end I had to call out emergency drain services and it cost me £114 to be cleared.

So I would really like your thoughts on the below:
Fair enough the manhole cover to the sewage pipe is outside the house (by 6 inches) - but surely (without going into too much detail) the cause for the blockage happened inside the house.....

Also how can they justify highlighting "blocked drains" in their promotional leaflets/website how many houses have their main drains inside?? Do they just mean a blocked sink then? How would that be an emergency?!

I feel that at the very least they have over-sold and mis-represented their offer. Would I have any come-back on this or a case to write to the ombudsman?

I will be changing my bank account now to a very basic one - this is the second time one of the so-called benefits has failed to deliver.

Thanks for your thoughts and advice.

Lottie

a con..... ok

take it you never read the t&c's at the start? do you ever read the t&c's.

Something is only a precieved con, because the customer precieved all scenarios to be covered.

though i will give at seems misrepresented.

if you have the leaflet. contact the advertising standards authority.

if they uphold, they would force the leaflet to be banned and rewritten.
best way to tackle it.