water damage to flat below

dargoon

It appears that water from the shower in my son's flat has been leaking through to the flat below. He tells me that he has been informed by his Insurance company that he is not covered by his policy. Perhaps somebody in the Insurance world can enlighten me or maybe one of you has knowledge of a similar incident. TIA.

Quentin

He needs to check the wording on his policy to see if he is covered (You don't say what he hopes to be covered for??)


Assuming he has not been negligent over this, then neither he nor his insurers are responsible for any damage caused to the downstairs flat

Aretnap

Generally speaking your insurance covers (a) your own property and (b) your legal liabilities to other people. It doesn't cover your neighbour's property - it's there to protect you, not to protect your neighbour. If your neighbour wants to protect his own property he needs to insure it himself.

So the starting point is that your son's neighbour needs to claim for the damage on his own insurance. Which is a little tough on him since it isn't his fault, but then if his flat was damaged by a storm, or a fire, or he was burgled those things wouldn't be his fault either, but he'd still be left to claim on his own policy.

The exception to this is if your son is legally liable for the damage to the neighbour's property, in which case it would be covered under the liability section of his home insurance policy. However in a legal sense he's not liable merely because the leak came from his flat - he's only liable if the leak resulted from his negligence. Negligence means failing to take the care that would be expected of a reasonable person. An example of what might amount to negligence would be if he knew about the leak, but made no attempt to get it fixed in a reasonable timescale. OTOH if a pipe in a non-obvious place has started leaking over time and the first he knew about it was when the neighbour knocked on his door, that's unlikely to amount to negligence, and neither he nor his insurer have any legal duty to pay for the damage to the neighbour's flat.

Unfortunately this sort of thing does sometimes cause friction between neighbours because most people don't understand how the law works, and expect compensation simply because their neighbour's property was somehow involved in causing the damage, despite it being no fault of the neighbour himself.* (Another common example is where a storm blows your tree down and it damages your neighbour's property - again not your neighbour's fault, but not yours either). But that's not how liability law works, and your son's insurer won't cover damage for which he isn't legally liable on the basis of a vague sense of responsibility or social embarrassment on his part.

* The same people probably enjoy ranting about "compensation culture" on the strength of stories they've read in the Daily Mail about immigrants getting squillions of pounds for tripping on pavements. But I suppose few of us are 100% consistent in our views.

dargoon

many thanks for taking the time to reply with clear explanations. I will pass on to my son.