Solicitor put wrong details in to buildings & contents insurance

Peanut_Solo

Hello, 

We were recently due to renew our buildings and contents insurance, the price was going up to £850 a year!. When we questioned why it was so much we found out so many mistakes our solicitor made uploading our details, one being 4 adults at home but it’s 2 plus 2 children, part of our roof is flat, no smoke detectors or locks on windows, nobody at home all day, house worth 1 million and it goes on! We took this out when we bought our house 7 years ago this month and have been over paying all this time. This Solicitor retired in 2020 and company has been taken over. Do we have a case at all? We understand partly our fault for not noticing this a long long time ago and feeling really stupid!! 

fwor

Presumably the insurance policy documents were sent to you and not the solicitor? If so, it is the responsibility of the insured party to check that the policy suits their needs (by checking the policy documents when received). So no, you don't have a case at all.

elsien

Why  was your solicitor doing your insurance for you? And why have you never checked for factual accuracy the renewal proposal that comes out every year?

It’s not unusual for insurance companies to rely on inertia and keep bumping the price of every year so shopping around every year anyway can be a good thing. Not always,  but my mum got caught out thinking her bank would give her a good deal automatically. It didn’t. 

Exodi

To be honest, my first question reading the title was what was the solicitor doing organising home insurance for you? Why didn't you do it?

Plus in their defence, oftentimes what you enter is often manipulated to fit the insurers fields or inputs. For example, when I used a comparison site for home insurance last year, I noticed a lot of changes from what I input into the search from what the insurer was quoting for.

For all you know the solicitor did enter 2 adults and 2 children, but the insurer simplifies all people as adults, or there was not an option for part of the roof being flat and part being sloped so they had to pick one or the other, or a question along the lines of "do your windows and have locks and do you regularly use them" - most people have locks but very little use them so the answer might be no even though you have locks.

I guess what I'm driving at is that it's very easy to criticise, but they were completing effectively a questionnaire on your household when they don't live there and it's certainly not a typical thing for a solicitor to help with (though if you complain perhaps they won't bother in future). Even more so I have a feeling that the answers might be correct (from the insurers perspective) even though you to you they appear wrong.

Really I think the big question is why you didn't think to check your insurance when it was originally filed or for the last 7 years... it is your house, risk and policy after all.