British Gas Home Cover 400 - mis-sold insurance policy?

ilesmark

Hi all (I don't know where all the exclamation marks in this post have come from - I didn't put them in)

Up till recently I had an insurance policy via British Gas called Home Cover 400 that included cover for plumbing and drains as well as for my gas boiler.!!Not sure what the ceiling is for the gas boiler cover, but for the plumbing and drains it provides cover for Dynorod (part of British Gas) to clear drain blockages up to a ceiling of £1000 in any year.!

A little while ago I had a blockage to the rainwater pipe that runs under my house due to root ingress.!!The pipe, from the manhole in the front garden to where it picks up the rainwater from the downpipe at the back of the property, is roughly 12 metres.!!On one of their visits, Dynorod came to do a hydraulic root cut.!!They then said the pipe was blocked by something else more serious than root ingress towards the back of the house and that I would need to get my buildings insurance company to pay the extra over the £1000 ceiling allowed by the Home Cover 400 insurance policy.!

Eventually, another company (UKDN) got involved and on their first visit ascertained via CCTV that Dynorod had never cleared the blockage because they had only got 6 metres along the rainwater pipe before stopping their root cut.!

I questioned BG/Dyno!why they had only got 6 metres along the rainwater pipe before stopping their root cut, instead of continuing another 6 metres to the end.!The response on that one was that, by the time they had got 6 metres along the rainwater pipe, they had reached the £1000 ceiling allowed by the Home Cover 400 insurance policy.!!I find it inconceivable that a root cut along 6 metres of pipe WOULD cost £1000, or that having arrived on site and got everything set up it would have been that difficult just to carry on another 6 metres to the end, but this is what I’ve had in black and white from British Gas.!!And, judging from the dealings I had with BG/Dyno during this sorry saga, their preferred method of working DID seem to consist of turning up to a job and then finding excuses to down tools and go away again rather than seeing it through.!

My house is a terraced one built around 1900, very similar to hundreds of thousands if not millions of others across London and the rest of the UK.!!So a lot, if not all, of these houses must have roughly the same length of rainwater/sewage pipes, running about 12 – 15 metres from the manhole in the front garden to the rainwater downpipe / sewage pipes at the back of the property and all prone over time to getting blocked by root ingress.!

My question – if BG/Dyno are telling me that doing a simple and common operation like a root cut all the way to the end of such a pipe on such a common type of house costs over £1000 and that therefore the Home Cover 400 insurance policy wouldn’t cover the cost, doesn’t that make the plumbing and drains element of Home Cover 400 look rather like a mis-sold insurance policy?!

Just wondered other MSE-ers thought before I go back to BG/Dyno and/or the FOS.!

Thanks

Mark