Home insurance policy cancelled due to forgetting to disclose old claim

dragonshamanic

A few years ago, we tried to make a claim on our house insurance for water damage to flooring. It turned out that when she had set up the insurance my wife had forgotten to disclose a claim from 4 years and 11 months before. All claims within last 5 years need to be disclosed of course. This failure to disclose resulted in our claim being rejected and our policy being cancelled.

This was clearly a mistake on our part and we would never purposefully withold information from an insurer, as we are not stupid.

Now we've had a policy cancelled, this simple oversight has resulted in many insurers simply refusing to provide home and contents policies for us, and the only cover we can get is way more than double the going rate.

Is there anything we can do about this? Does this last forever?

DullGreyGuy

What exactly have they said about the ending of the old policy? Did they cancelled or void? Did they mention CIDRA (Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act)? Did they comment on if they'd have insured you had the claim been disclosed?

In short, it is for life and if the premiums you are getting are double the going rate you aren't doing as bad as some. There are some individual insurers that allegedly ask about any in the last X years (x = 5-10) but these things change over time as Direct Line is often quoted as one such insurer but looking at their website today it now asks if you've ever had insurance cancelled.

Really your solution is to dispute that they could cancel the policy for non-disclosure, if they accept that it was an act of carelessness and not deliberate nor reckless and they would have insured you should the claim have been declared then generally they shouldn't be cancelling the policy.

Aretnap

DullGreyGuy said:

In short, it is for life and if the premiums you are getting are double the going rate you aren't doing as bad as some. There are some individual insurers that allegedly ask about any in the last X years (x = 5-10) but these things change over time as Direct Line is often quoted as one such insurer but looking at their website today it now asks if you've ever had insurance cancelled.

Last time I checked it was Direct Line's car insurance quote form that asked about cancellations in the last 5 years, but their home insurance asked if you'd ever had a policy cancelled. (No, me neither.)

The OP should be declaring it on car insurance as well (if asked, and if he drives a car), so it may at least be worth trying for car insurance.