Back in October 2009 we posted a warning about insurance renewals – you can find the blog post here. To summarise we warned of the need to declare to your insurance company the proximity of your property to a watercourse.

A Freuchie resident contacted us recently with a concerning story about their latest insurance renewal.

We live in Green Tree Brae but were not flooded last time. As we live at the top of the Brae, it is unlikely that we would ever flood, however – last month I received a renewal letter from the current Insurer, the PO, saying that our premium was going to increase from £292 to £700+. The insurer explained this was due to premiums going up and the majority of underwriters no longer insuring homes within 200m of a watercourse. I have always declared that we live near the burn as I know that otherwise your policy becomes void. I then spent days calling 30+ Insurers – none of which would even quote me until finally AXA agreed a price for us. It struck me that a huge % of Freuchie must be within 200m of a watercourse but would not have declared it to their Insurers and therefore many residents will not actually be covered by their Insurers. All a bit scarey heh?

In a further email the resident was concerned for other residents who may unknowingly or otherwise be failing to declare the fact they are close to a watercourse thereby making their policy invalid.

It isn’t just if you get flooded when the policies become invalid – it’s any policy and any claim at all that becomes invalid if you haven’t declared in advance that you live within 200m of a watercourse,  even if you claim for an iron burn on the carpet – you wouldn’t get anything! So basically people are paying for policies for no reason!

Everyone in the main village is most certainly within 200m of a watercourse, which by definition includes drainage ditches. By failing to declare your proximity to a watercourse you will be providing your insurer with a good reason to cancel your policy, keep your premiums and fail to pay out on any claim, of any type, you may have submitted. As the concerned resident has said, “… basically people are paying for policies for no reason!”

Thank you to the resident for sharing their story with us and providing permission for us to share it with you. Other residents experiencing issues with insurance renewals can get in contact with FFAG for advice and assistance.

Last years floods had a devastating impact on a great many families in all areas of Freuchie. It will come as no surprise, or perhaps it may, that for insurance purposes the vast majority of homes in Freuchie are now within 400m of a flood area.

Screen Capture: Money Supermarket online home insurance quotation form

Ensure you tick the correct boxes on your renewal or tell your insurer of this new fact that has come to light. Failure to do so may result in your policy being declared invalid or reduce future claim payments that are made.

Each insurer will no doubt take a different view of this situation, a view we’re sure will change as extreme weather patterns become more frequent. The only way to address these issues is to demonstrate that we as a community have done all we can, and have substantially reduced the risk of future floods.

Technorati Tags: flooding, Freuchie, insurance

The ABI Flood Insurance talk last week was well attended and was crowned a grand success by those who came along. Arthur Philp delivered an informative presentation,  thereafter providing comprehensive responses to our questions and comments. Everyone went away better equipped to deal with post flood event clean-up and reassured their future flood insurance needs will be dealt with in an affordable and reasonably simple manner. A video of the talk is shown below.

Freuchie Flood Action Group would like to express our gratitude to Arthur Philp of the ABI and Norwich Union for his time and effort putting together the presentation.

Thank you to everyone who came along and contributed valuable feedback and questions.

Once again we are indebted to the Lomond Hills Hotel for providing the venue. Thank you Ronnie.

Resources:

  Video of the talk, hosted on Blip.TV

 Presentation deck in PDF format

You will need Acrobat Reader, a free download from Adobe, to be able to view the presentation deck.

Technorati Tags: ABI, Arthur Philp, flood, flooding, insurance, Lomond Hills Hotel, Norwich Union

Just a little reminder of our Insurance Industry talk tonight with Arthur Philp of the ABI. All the details are here.

Technorati Tags: ABI, Arthur Philp, flooding, insurance

The next public meeting of Freuchie Flood Action Group is a presentation from Arthur Philp from the Association of British Insurers (ABI), during which we shall hear about the insurance industries perspective of flooding and how this may affect all residents of Freuchie and other flood affected communities.

Once again, we’re delighted to have secured such a high profile expert speaker to come along to present to flood survivors and other residents of Freuchie and beyond. 

Thanks go again to the Lomond Hills Hotel for providing the venue.

Date & Time
5th February 2009 at 7:00 for 7:15pm

Venue
Lomond Hills Hotel – Freuchie

Abstract
During this presentation, Arthur will explain the Statement of Principles for flood insurance, with the main aim at the meeting to cover – "What property owners need to do to help protect their property from future flooding and to help their insurer provide them with the best possible terms for future insurance."

After a short presentation Arthur will offer an opportunity to touch upon the presentation content and other flood and insurance matters of interest within a question and answer session. Arthur doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but he is genuinely interested in hearing the problems from the audience’s perspective. This is an important area where the insurance industry recognises the need to understand problems better and ensure all concerned work towards providing better solutions.

The developments in the new Scottish Flooding Bill should be touched upon during the talk and Q&A session.

Speaker Biography
After graduating from Aberdeen University, in mathematics, Arthur Philp has spent virtually all of his career in insurance – initially within IT developing insurance administration systems, then in project management and for the last 20 years, in Underwriting Household Insurance.

Although employed by Norwich Union, he is currently on part-time secondment to the insurance industry trade body, the Association of British Insurers (ABI). This follows a seven month full time secondment as a member of a joint working group with Government on the review of the Statement of Principles for flood insurance. Current work involves completing negotiations on the Statement of Principles for flood insurance with the devolved Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as continuing work on provision of flood risk data to insurers from the Environment Agency, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the Northern Ireland Rivers Agency.

Within Norwich Union he is the Underwriting Development Manager for Household insurance, working within a department responsible for Underwriting Strategy. Arthur has been involved in considering the problems of insuring property against flood both within Norwich Union and with ABI since the early nineties when insurers had initial concerns about the increasing risk of coastal flooding in the South East of England due to climate change and, of course, significant river flooding in Perth (1993) and Glasgow (1994).

Arthur is a Chartered Insurer and has been working in the insurance industry for the past 35 years. He also represents the ABI in Scotland as a member of the Government’s Flooding Bill Advisory Group.

Technorati Tags: ABI, Arthur Philp, Fife, flooding, Freuchie, Freuchie Flood Action Group, insurance

I thought I’d share a little story with everyone so you know to shop around for your insurance this year.

The car taken from me in the August flood event was a boy racer class Subaru Impreza (otherwise known as a Scooby). I’ve got nothing but praise for my insurers at the time, who handled the claim swiftly and efficiently, even if I did have to push them to up their write-off offer. They did eventually, after a short delay, come up with market value for the car.

Aware of the high cost of insurance and running costs for the Scooby I opted for a boring, economical, safe and planet saving Citroen C5 Diesel as a replacement. It is at least a couple of insurance groups less than the Scooby and I have protected no claims, so I was actually looking forward to paying less for the car insurance this coming year.

However, the renewal came through the door and to say I was shocked is a complete understatement! The current insurer has come back with a quote of £472 on a policy that should have been much lower than last years. Various expletives filled the air when that letter was opened last week! I even contacted them for an explanation and after a few minutes they came back with a statement along the lines of, “the price is the price”.

Not content with just renewing the policy and giving away good money for this inflated premium I shopped around on one of the price comparison websites, MoneySuperMarket to be exact. The difference in quotes was startling, with some as low as £250 for the same level of cover.

To all you car flood victims, do remember to shop around for your car insurance if it seems to have gone up substantially following your flood claim.

Regards

John A Thomson
Chairman of Freuchie Flood Action Group
& Freuchie Mill Flood Survivor

Technorati Tags: car insurance, Fife, flood, flooding, Freuchie, insurance

Check out page four of The Courier today as our own Willy Harrison of Freuchie Mill is pictured in his wheelchair while telling us about his car insurance woes. We’re hoping to get a video interview with Wullie in the next day or two where all will become clear!

The nice folk over at the Fife Herald have also been on the telephone so expect to see something in Friday’s newspaper from Liz Rougvie.

Technorati Tags: Fife Herald, flood, Freuchie, Freuchie Mill, insurance, The Courier