Student Liability Insurance

bungalow_bill

Hi....help needed please!
Have been told we need student liability insurance by lettings company before signing rental agreement (1st year student). They're recommending Endsleigh, as that is who is arranging the guarantor scheme etc. However Endsleigh will only offer a combined student liability and contents, with an enforced minimum of £8500 contents. Already have contents arranged through home insurance, so dont particularly want to pay twice. Also Endsleigh say its the same price whether you have contents included or not.

Is this normal for student lettings? Any recommendations for companies. Any ideas of prices? Must have a minimum cover of £2500. Need it by Friday

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

As someone that amongst other things understands all things insurance pretty well but doesn't currently practice in insurance I can tell you this sounds like the lettings company wants to protect their room from damage by the person they are renting it to. In this case it (the letting) is to a student, and in the normal wider world it would simply be "the tenant".

Tenant's liability coverage has long been an automatic benefit of home contents cover. If you own your home you will never use it, except that is, perhaps if you as a parent have a great home contents policy wording yourself which somehow provides cover to your offspring for exactly that when they rent at university (I am not aware of such but it may be out there!).

Tenant's liability section limits vary from different insurers and used to be higher than they are now - probably because the incidence of "trashing" has become more of a societal ill. I think a typical tenants' liability limit might now be £7,500 to £10,000 on a standard household policy but a limit of £2,500 doesn't surprise me from Endsleigh for students.

In my day, actual claims against tenants for damage were few and far between (in my various stints as underwriter/claims clerk/broker I don't think I ever saw one!).

As I say, if I am right about what they mean by "student liability" cover, the cover is normally an integral part of any home contents cover whether it be a home contents policy designed specially for students or any other and you usually don't get offered it any other way (than as part of buying a contents insurance). That's because it is pretty hard for underwriters to make a book on just that one tiny area of liability insurance where claims are so infrequent and result from very random types of incident (or used to!) ...

Another type of standard liability cover (that's were a third party other than the letting company or property owner is pointing at damage to their property and then at you to say we expect you to pay for it!) included with all home contents policies that I have ever seen is known as personal liability cover e.g. protection for when your dog bites the postman and sues, or where as a cyclist you are held responsible for a road accident and receive incoming litigation. Sensible limits for those kind of things are however not less than £1M and you should be wary of a policy that has a lower limit for that (because that could be your only protection against third party injury or death claims against you and would be sorely tested in the road accident scenario where multi-million claims for paraplegic accident victims are now commonplace. A further more obscure type of automatic liability cover with a contents policy I think is occupiers liability. That would protect you from claims for injury or death to visitors to the property who might trip over the wires to the wireless router you brought with you !

I know that some student letting companies selling halls of residence type accommodation in association with universities do offer some kind of student insurance (basic contents and liability cover) for an extra amount per month or per week paid via their rental collection system. The benefit to the student is more likely to be seen as the contents cover than any part of the liability automatic add-ons.

I suppose the angle they choose to "make" you buy it is the obscure student(tenant)'s liability cover - it is not a mandatory form of insurance unless they make it so in the lettings contract and then they cannot make you buy theirs but they could require you to show another policy which covers the same (obscure) thing.

Endsleigh is a well know student insurance package outfit that has targeted students for decades. Like all insurance though, they can't be trusted on the basis of their reputations decades ago. They are all prone to trimming cover to the bone in cartel fashion and not really worrying then about whether they are standing above the crowd offering an obviously better deal than the others.

They all make more money by sticking loosely together and offering policies that sometimes give as much protection from the elements as a string vest (in other words can be useful but you usually need another layer or two!).

Hope I've explained it all reasonably usefully. I am confident that "student liability" is tenant liability in this case, but if someone out there knows that my confidence is misplaced please jump in quickly and patch up what I have offered! Thanks!

PS I think there is an outside chance that a parent's home contents policy might include by free extension of the meaning of "insured person" some cover for some students contents away from home and even cover their personal liability (e.g. as a cyclist) as a member of the insured parents' immediate family normally living at the parents address when not away as a student, but it might be a stretch too far to expect it to go further and to include the students liability as a tenant at another property. These things can only be assessed by close analysis of the policy document (the policy summary or key feature document will NOT do) or else by a chat with an insurance broker.