House Insurance & Sump Pumps..??

JustAnotherSaver

Apologies in advance if this is a long one...

When we bought our house we were unaware of the issues under the living room floor. Never came up on the survey.

Story short(er) - we discovered that there is natural water underneath the living room floor which short of £12k solid floor which we can't afford, we can't get rid of. We were in touch with water company, council, neighbours etc - advised to just 'manage' it.

So the whole thing has been renewed - walls have had K11 tanking treatment on them (as old plaster had bad signs of salts showing & plaster breakdown). The floor joists & boards have been renewed & a brand new pump installed.


We were under the impression the pump was originally to stop the living room from flooding but it turns out that it actually doesn't (flood).

The sleeper wall is 9-10 course of bricks high & the black line which i took to be the natural water level was 4-5 bricks high over a span of 7mtrs-x-4mtrs.

If some of you can cast your mind back to last Xmas when the North West took a battering with floods, our electricity was out for about 2-3 days under those conditions - so the pump wasn't going to do a thing & the water level came nowhere near the joists. It got to its level & stayed there despite it continuing to bucket it down.





So on to the topic of house insurance - there's currently no mention of a sump pump. When i last did a quote (a few years ago as the past few have been on auto-renewal) i don't remember any such mention - we're with the AA.

So.......

* Should i mention it?
* If there's no option on an online form fill out, what would you do then? Leave it? Phone up to get a more personalised quote?


The thing that bothers me is that even when the whole area was flooding - we didn't come close to flooding, but if i mention it then surely we'll go down as a flood risk. Also if i mention it but don't put it on, surely it'll get flagged on some central database or something.


Just looking for opinions from people more experienced than I

paddyandstumpy

You have a duty to answer the questions asked of you. Nothing more. Gone are the days of needing to voluntarily disclose anything which could be considered material. This works in your favour, as long as you answer the questions about flood history accurately.

Side point to note, I work for an insurer that underwrites the AA product, so I'm putting my own insurer in the 'firing line' by saying this, but it's fact.

Ultimately it's up to the insurer to have as good a dataset they can to ensure they know all they want to know about a risk, to ensure the price is accurate.

JustAnotherSaver

paddyandstumpy wrote: »

You have a duty to answer the questions asked of you. Nothing more. Gone are the days of needing to voluntarily disclose anything which could be considered material. This works in your favour, as long as you answer the questions about flood history accurately.

Side point to note, I work for an insurer that underwrites the AA product, so I'm putting my own insurer in the 'firing line' by saying this, but it's fact.

Ultimately it's up to the insurer to have as good a dataset they can to ensure they know all they want to know about a risk, to ensure the price is accurate.

Thanks for the response.

I did wonder about that, but as you say - there'll be a question about flood history & we've never been flooded since we've owned the house & the previous owner filled out the sheet to say that they had never been flooded either.