HELP! Home Insurance flood payout

sh86

Hello,


This is going to be a long one, so sorry in advance.


Our home was flooded on 7/2/14 and we are having trouble getting our insurer to pay out.


They claim we didn't declare living near a river.....when as far as we were aware we didn't. There is a storm ditch/environmental run off running through our neighbours garden that we only became aware of since the flood. This ditch was blocked by a fallen wall and thus resulted in the water coming over the top instead of flowing through.


How am I to prove that 1) we weren't aware of its presence? Would this not have been made apparent when the house searches were done?
and 2) How do we prove it is not a river? It has never had water in it before now ( a neighbour who has lived there for 40yrs assures me)


Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions you can give me.

Quentin

This looks like you may need proper legal advice, (though an appeal by way of complaint against their decision followed by escalation to the FOS won't preclude you taking legal action if they refuse it and the FOS agrees with them)

sh86

Thanks for the reply.


I wondered if insurers did a search on your postcode when applying with them? This insurance was taken out a week before we even moved in, I'm unsure how I was to know that some sort of water was present as it was never raised as a concern in our environmental searches when buying the house.

Quentin

sh86 wrote: »

.....I wondered if insurers did a search on your postcode when applying with them?....

Many insurers don't spend time/money verifying your application answers until they need to - eg. as you have discovered, after a claim is received.

sh86

Trust me to have to find that out the hard way

InsideInsurance

What was the exact question that they asked you/ assumption you agreed to? Was it about rivers or was it about water courses? How have they now discovered about this water course?

If you answer "yes" to the watercourse question do they still quote on their website? Is it directly with an insurer you went or via an intermediary/ broker?

Spikey1

CIDRA 2013 will protect you if the answer you gave to the Insurer at proposal stage was honest and you could not reasonably have known about the presence of the ditch in the neighbours property.


Check the housebuyers survey you (or your lender) would have arranged when you got your mortgage. Assuming that it is silent on this ditch you will be in a strong position.


You'll be in an even stronger position if your insurance is arranged via the mortgage lender......they will not be happy with your insurer if their own interest are not protected in situations like yours.

sh86

Thank you for all your replies. I've just read the small print and it states 'do you live within 400m of a river, riverbank or seafront.'

I guess it's going to be an argument on the definition of a river. The ditch in question is called an agricultural tributary.

Hope I've got a leg to stand on.

Thanks again

Aretnap

sh86 wrote: »

Thank you for all your replies. I've just read the small print and it states 'do you live within 400m of a river, riverbank or seafront.'

I guess it's going to be an argument on the definition of a river. The ditch in question is called an agricultural tributary

That's one line of argument. The other is whether you could have been expected to know that it was there at all. Under the Ombudsman's guidance, and now the Consumer Insurance Act 2012, if you took reasonable care to ensure that the information you provided was accurate, you should not be penalised if it turns out to be inaccurate.

http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/technical_notes/misrepresentation-and-non-disclosure.htm

If the ditch wasn't visible from your property, or from other land you'd regularly walk across, and if it wasn't mentioned in the survey, then you'd have a decent case for arguing that you could not have known about it, and therefore that you took reasonable care to ensure that the information was accurate, even setting aside the argument about whether or not it's a river.

iBeast

If you feel you that the insurers should pay out, i.e answered the questions correctly/best of your knowledge just go to FOS let them deal with it, cost you nothing, best off complaining first to the insurers make copies of all your letters you send and receive, wirte down times of phone calls, who you are speaking to as well, once you have submitted a complaint to the insurers, if they still dont resolve, got to FOS, Remember FOS is a free serivce which automatically charges the insurers to deal with the compaint whether or not the its the insurers fault.
IF FOS feel that the insurer should pay out, they will have to pay out legally.

So just to recap, if you think you are in the right follow the above, if not then next time the chap on the phone asks you to read the T&C's when you get the document make sure you read them!!


FOS - Financial Ombudsman
Hope this helps

sh86

Back again!


I did read the terms and conditions and believe that a tributary (which is what is near us) is exactly that and not a river. There was no definition of a river in the policy.


I'm also wondering if that when we applied for the mortgage on the house that the environmental searches would have been sent to our proposed lender. Again, nothing came back to us to say we were in close proximity to a river or in a high flood risk area.


Unfortunately, all the paperwork in regards to the initial house move have been wrecked by the flooding in question.