The Insurance Act – 2 years on

It’s been 2 years since the Insurance Act came into force. In our latest blog, our Claims Director, Jody Thirkell, talks about whether he felt the act had actually produced any tangible changes.

Before the act was introduced, I told people there was no cause for early panicking. It had taken over 100 years of legal precedent to work out what the duty of disclosure under the Marine Insure Act 1906 actually meant, so nothing drastic was going to change overnight.

In reality, it seems like I’ve been proven correct.

We’re still finding out as much as we can about our clients and their risks and presenting that information to insurers as normal. Insurers are still writing business on the same information they always have.

The insurance world keeps on turning.

That may seem glib, and it’s still crucial that a Broker gets to know their clients and their risks to ensure a fair presentation of risk to insurers. But the main changes we’ve seen so far have been very positive.

Insurers can no longer avoid paying claims for breaches of warranty that are not relevant to the claim.

Before the Insurance Act, an insurer could avoid a fire claim for a breach of a burglar alarm warranty. This always seemed perverse and the Act has restricted insurers’ remedies for breaches of policy conditions in a positive way for policy holders.

A further positive is that if the insurer alleges that there has been an innocent non-disclosure of a material fact, they also have to prove that the underwriter had been induced to write the risk due to the lack of fair presentation. This may be simple to prove in personal lines insurance where there is clear underwriting criteria available, but not so easy when looking at complex commercial risks.

This is where your Broker comes in and Romero’s have had great success in using cogent arguments based on the Insurance Act to achieve excellent results on claims for our clients. Are you confident that your Broker has the requisite claims expertise to do likewise should you find yourself in a difficult situation following a loss?

If you’d like to pick Jody’s brains a little more on the impact of the Insurance Act, you can find him on LinkedIn. Alternatively, if you’d like to find out how Romero can save you money and make sure you have the complete tailored policy, call us today on 0113 281 8110.