No Claims Discount proof for Home contents insurance. No proof required? really? 15 September 2022 at 11:18AM in Insurance & life assurance 9 replies 171 views

492800

 I've owned a home for 10 years and always had Home contents insurance, probably never been without insurance for more than 3 months at a time. I changed insurers every year or two.

Recently I moved into a new place with my new-ish partner, cancelled out old insurance with AXA, and got new home insurance Tesco. When asked on the aggregator site, I said I had 8 years 'no-claims'.

Now, 3 months later, I suddenly wondered "do i have proof for the no-claims" what if i missed something? will I be fully covered? (don't we all have those midnight pre-sleep worries?)

I contacted my old insurer Axa, to ask for proof just in case I needed to use it for my Tesco. and got a reply, which I felt odd. 

Axa's reply was

• Although we do ask the question at quote stage with regards to how many years claim free you are, we do not currently require proof of this. You may be familiar with the process for Motor insurance; however, it is not an industry standard that we require proof for home insurance.
  
  Due to this we don't issue a proof of No Claims Discount document for you home insurance policies. I can confirm during your time with AXA you had completed 1 year and 5 months claim free

This now leaves me wondering if I need to check with tesco, or if this is normal? Or would I need to go back through ALL of my old insurers should i need to make a claim to prove my no-claims? What if I am wrong am I am not 8 years no-claims, and actually less.

Has anyone had to prove their no-claims? Hope to hear your thoughts on this situation

comeandgo

It’s not that you get a discount for not claiming on house insurance, you pay a premium if you have had a lot of claims.

lisyloo

No the onus is not on you to prove it.
if you are wrong then it could be a big issue.
if the issue is inadvertent - for example this can happen on medical insurance when people don’t actually have all of the information regarding family conditions, then you would probably get a claim paid but something knocked off for the premium discount(s) you weren’t entitled to.
if it was clear you lied (for example it’s not credible to forget your house burned down or you were burgled) then you would probably find you wouldn’t be allowed to claim and you’d have MAJOR issues with ALL insurance in future as you’d need to declare it forever than you had a claim denied.

if you don’t think you can rely on your memory then you need to keep records.

I am now filling all my emails and electronic insurance details - it’s not difficult to keep the paperwork in a file or emails in a folder.

but burden to prove your no claims is not on you.

biscan25

And they already know what claims you have made, whether you have had insurance cancelled etc up to 6 years from the CUE database.

DullGreyGuy

Most Home insurers dont have a concept of "no claims discount" but instead simply ask how many continuous years you've had insurance and how many claims in the last 3-5 years. If you look on Tesco's own website they dont ask about NCD at all.

Obviously if you go through an aggregator they ask the questions that all their big clients want the answers to but many will either ignore questions they arent interested in (eg NCD on Home) or have to translate answers into their own categories (eg percentage of flat roof may be 0,25%,50%,75%,100% on the agregator but on tesco its 0, 33%, 50% 100% so someone selecting 25-50% will get translated to 33%-50% even though technically it may be 30% and so should go into the 1%-33% bucket)

Home insurers have access to systems like CUE which wont validate any NCD but will highlight any claims you've made and failed to declare and that generally is sufficient. 

DullGreyGuy

comeandgo said:

It’s not that you get a discount for not claiming on house insurance, you pay a premium if you have had a lot of claims.

For those that operate an NCD scheme it is that you get a discount for not having had claims whilst holding insurance... someone buying their first ever home insurance has 0 claims but for these insurers they'd pay more than the customer next to them that have 0 claims but 10 years NCD.  

dunstonh

There is no concept of a no claims discount on household insurance apart from a couple of providers that do it as a marketing gimmick.   Most insurers will factor pricing into the "have you had a claim in the last x years" question and use that alone.

Using an aggregator that asks how many years you have is just so they cater for the rare ones that operate the NCD gimmick. Most insurers won't link to that particular question and will ignore it.

This goes for many financial products that are put through quote systems.   Not all questions apply to all insurers/providers.

492800

I just had a look on my tesco contract and it does have the section stating no-claims amount. Guess they are the gimmicky company


Frustratingly, having been thru all my emails and documents, I can only find evidence of insurance going back to 2016, even though I know I have had some insurance since 2012.
Annoyingly I have just realised that all my emails don't go before 2016 even though I've had my account 1994, so something has gotten lost along the way

lisyloo

You shouldn’t need evidence.
surely if you’d claimed previously it would be recorded on the paperwork you have as you would have had to have declare it for 3 or 5 years.
Id advise keeping record for the future but right now you have no need to prove anything.

if you think you might have forgotten about a claim and misrepresented the information for 3-5 years then I’d advise you to keep everything and check thoroughly at every renewal if you think you might be that forgetful.
normally making a claim is not that forgettable as not only did you have to go through a claim process but you also had to replace or fix whatever it was that got lost, broken, stolen, burnt or flooded.

DullGreyGuy

dunstonh said:
 Most insurers will factor pricing into the "have you had a claim in the last x years" question and use that alone.

Most combine it with "how many continuous years have you held home insurance?"... no claims but never had insurance is a different kettle of fish to someone with insurance for 20 years and no claims.