Home Insurance Recommendations

JasryaBrenel

My home insurance is due for renewal in March and I am trying to get a feel for what the best home insurance is for me.
I would rather pay a little bit more to be sure I get good cover and good claims service.
I will need the higher level of cover so at least £75,000k contents insurance and £450,000 buildings. 
Currently with direct line with their direct line plus cover but I did notice there cover isn’t as comprehensive e.g. their trace and access only kicks in if there is damage to the building - seems ridiculous to me but there you go.
However their home emergency cover is (from recent experience with a blocked drain) very good.
I have heard John Lewis are good for claims service but not sure how good their cover is whereas LV is good for cover but not for claims service
I was an underwriter for Sun alliance (as they were then) and Chubb insurance back in the day but am out of touch with the insurance industry so would really appreciate your thoughts 

Rodders53

John Lewis will have the policy documents online to read https://www.johnlewisfinance.com/insurance/home-insurance/contact-us.html#question-3 and have four levels of cover to choose from.  We have Premier.

RSA (aka Royal & Sun Alliance) are the underwriters which may influence some matters.  More>Than is owned by RSA.

Claims are OK-ish from our field-mice-infestation escape of water experience (we had to kick their claims handling company via John Lewis Insurance a few times to get things progressing).  The track and trace guy was very helpful, despite the mess he made, but all the leaks were inside the building .  I now definitely loathe plastic plumbing parts.

Sandtree

You always need to take recommendations with a pinch of salt, in particular when you are talking about white labels as I would say M&S are great but my experience is from when Axa was their underwriter whereas they currently use Aviva. Insurers can change, so Aviva in recent years has brining more claims handling in house which you'd hope is a positive move but you can buy from the MGAs that write on Aviva paper but the MGA does the claims handling via a TPA and so the Aviva badging means almost nothing.

Personally I am with M&S because of high individual item limits, matching set cover and reasonable premiums in comparison to those aimed at the MNW (eg Hiscox Direct, Barclays Premier, Direct Line Select etc)

HappyFish2021

Do not use Axa in any circumstances. My experience with them has been foul, welching on paying out, lots of lies and evasion.

JasryaBrenel

Thanks for all your advice guys, looks like I will need to do some major research before I decide where to go.
Rodders53 - I had an escape of water claim 5 years back with Admiral, I had to kick their guys a fair amount too (kept getting jobsworths sent round to do the work so had to be on the ball). 
I have noticed a lot of insurers have stopped giving trace and access cover unless there is actual damage to the building which is a bit of a pain if you know there is a leak (like in central heating) and are trying to avoid loads of damage to the property.
Sandtree - The problem I think we all have nowadays is the insurers need to outsource everything so we end up dealing with third party companies and then when things go wrong we have no-one to turn to.

Sandtree

JasryaBrenel said:

The problem I think we all have nowadays is the insurers need to outsource everything so we end up dealing with third party companies and then when things go wrong we have no-one to turn to.

Clearly if you are a small insurance company then it would be expensive to maintain a UK wide network of loss adjustors when you could go months between claims in certain areas and having the volume of staff to deal with the seasonal variations etc is more expensive and so outsourcing starts looking attractive and cost saving even though you are paying a profit margin to the outsourcer and duplicating many support functions.

There are many larger insurers that on paper have no "need" to outsource; as mentioned Aviva has been insourcing recently and stopping their outsourcing of claims to TPAs for core products. That said, companies need to decide where their strengths are and if they want to specialize or be more of a generalist. A couple of significant providers in the annuity/pensions space have been moving to outsourced models recently so they focus on what they believe they are good at (investments) and buy operational expertise and systems from an outsourcer .