House fire; found out home insurance not autorenewed

Owlypebble

Hoping for thoughts and advice from anyone who has been in this or similar situation, or knows about home insurance and autorenewal.

We had a big house fire Saturday night. We all (me, DH, dd8, ds3; both kids with additional needs) got out. Fire confined to garage and room above, but caused structural damage; rest of house heavily smoke damaged, large proportion of contents a right off, plus remedial work needed. We'll be out for 6 months+.

Found out on Saturday daytime that our house insurance did not autorenew in Nov as our credit cards had been changed. I had 2 emails telling me this at the time (which didn't go into my inbox) which I missed. For context, we've been home owners separately and/or jointly for 18 years, with home insurance. 

(I'd usually diary a reminder too but we relied on autorenewal the previous year as dd8 was having violent meltdowns, and struggling generally, due to EBSA and what we now know us autistic burnout, and I didn't rediary. Dd8 has been out of school for nearly 12 months now, but with ongoing MH issues, plus going through the gruelling EHCP process, and DS3 had scarlet fever (with out of hours night time hospital visit due to 41deg temp) just prior to renewal date, so we were already in crisis - hence I was not on top of stuff.)

As far as I aware I had 2 emails from the insurer, and no letters or phone calls about the payment issue and the cancellation. 

I've seen posts from other people where they have been billed by their insurer for autorenewal after bounced payment (but they didn't want it) so that they have not been left without insurance, but this didn't happen in our case. Are there any standards around this? 

For info, our insurer stopped offering new home insurance policies/renewals to anyone 9 days after they cancelled our policy.

If you've got this far (thank you!) - any thoughts from experience/insurance knowledge advice and where we could go from here would be great.

Wonka_2

Other than sympathy which isn't going to help you what actions did you take between Sat daytime when you discovered this and the fire on Saturday night ? Or are the timings wrong in your post ?

Given the 4 month lapse your previous insurer is unlikely to keep chasing - and certainly not with phone calls just in case the letter/email/SMS didn't get through

Hopefully one of the insurance experts on here can give some more positive suggestions

Owlypebble

Thanks Wonka_2 Sorry meant that the fire was Friday night - early hours Saturday morning - found out about non-autorenewal on Saturday when I looked for policy details after fire - thanks for the spot, very tired! Not sure if I can edit original post - do you happen to know? Or shall I take it down and fix and repost as don't want to distract!

MattMattMattUK

Owlypebble said:

Thanks Wonka_2 Sorry meant that the fire was Friday night - early hours Saturday morning - found out about non-autorenewal on Saturday when I looked for policy details after fire - thanks for the spot, very tired! Not sure if I can edit original post - do you happen to know? Or shall I take it down and fix and repost as don't want to distract!

You cannot as you are a new user, one is only allowed to edit after being on the site for a period of time. No need to take it down as we can see your correction from this post. 

Owlypebble

@MattMattMattUK Ah ok, thank you. OK, I'll leave it up as is then.

DullGreyGuy

Its not 100% clear what's happened... did the policy actually renew and then was cancelled because they were unable to collect payment or did they identify the card issue before the renewal and therefore sent you a manual renewal which you didnt respond to?

Aretnap

I looked into something like this a little while ago. See this post (and the rest of the long thread).

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/78333332/#Comment_78333332

The Cliff Notes version is that if an insurer switches from auto-renewing your policy to expecting you to contact it to renew, the Financial Ombudsman expects then to put quite a lot of effort into making sure that you are aware of this fact - simply sending it in a letter or Email and expecting you to read it in detail might not be enough.

Your case is somewhat different to the ones I linked to there - your policy didn't renew because of a problem with your payment method, rather than because of a deliberate decision by the insurer not to auto-renew it. However I still think you can make an argument on similar principles - ie given the consequences of being uninsured there is a duty on the insurer to do all it reasonably can to warn you that your policy is going to lapse. Did they do all they reasonably could? How prominent were the warnings in the Emails? Did the subject lines say "Information about your renewal- or "warning - your insurance is about to cease"? Did they send a letter as well? Etc etc...

Owlypebble

@DullGreyGuy Good point. I've looked through the emails again.

This is my email trail summary:
6 Nov - Email to say thank you for renewing, and that our new insurance would start on 11th Nov
7 Nov - Email to say when we took out the policy we'd asked for autorenewal, but the payment had failed (which I didn't see - Gmail filters out of Inbox into Updates), so they couldn't take payment, so they couldn't renew and if they didn't hear from me before the 10th Nov I'd have to set up a new policy.
21 Nov - Email (which, again, I didn't see) to say that our insurance would be cancelled on the 21st Nov.

So not sure if it did renew or not. But am sure it is now cancelled - both insurer and underwriter have confirmed this.

DullGreyGuy

So it did renew and was then cancelled for non-payment.

You've ultimately got nothing to lose and may as well put in a complaint about insufficient notice however this is different from an insurer deciding not to renew you but you'd also have both knowledge you're changed your cards and lack of seeing a payment on your card account as additional factors that should have highlighted an issue. 

Its always sensible to add your insurer to your safe sender list to prevent junkmail etc taking important notices

dunstonh

From what you have said, I cannot see any wrongdoing here and your email filtering is not the fault of the insurer.  I have turned off that daft gmail filtering in the settings to keep a straight inbox.     So, I suspect the insurer would fight a complaint and ultimately you would need to go to the FOS and let them decide.    I wouldn't be confident but you can never prejudge a FOS decision.

I don't see this as a change from auto-renew to manual renewal but as the policy did renew but failure to pay caused it to be cancelled.   This also gives you a second problem of having to declare a cancelled insurance on future applications/renewals.  Although that is minor compared to your key issue.

Owlypebble

Thank you @DullGreyGuy and @dunstonh. Ok, yes, I see - as the policy cancelled on 21st Nov, it must have renewed as it was due to start on 11th Nov.

(Sorry, it's hard to process everything at the moment, so please bare with my slowness - after the trauma of running from our house in the middle of the night in our PJs and bare feet, and watching flames reach to the roof of the house while we waited for the fire engines, realising it was my 9yos birthday, then having to tell her that her gerbils had died - even dealing with the necessities of housing and food are difficult at the moment, let alone the rest of everything).

I think first off we will try getting as high up in both organisations as possible just to talk to someone and explain the situation and see if we get any traction. My post wasn't meant to be all about fault, but also to whatever routes might be viable ways to turn the situation around.

But then it sounds like a complaint could be a next step, with potential FOS involvement. Thanks for the pointer on trying insufficient notice. 

Yes, agree if there are no standards/rules around how much you have to try to contact people, it is our 'fault'. I am surprised though that email is deemed sufficient, and enough duty of care, for something so life shattering when a letter is so much more likely to be seen.

Do you know if there are professionals who support with complaints etc, and what type they would be?

Thanks so much for your thoughts and help.