dspp wrote:Dod101 wrote:Technically these days most insurance company employees are not very good. A bit like bankers. In the old days like when I were a lad, we had to study home correspondence courses starting off with the Lloyds coffee houses and the theory of insurance. They should certainly be able to refer you immediately to the clause in your business interruption policy to clarify what is and what is not covered. There should also be (and probably is somewhere) a directive from the insurers top management about how to proceed because in this sort of situation if one insurer accepts liability, correctly or otherwise, it tends to open the floodgates. I doubt that there will have been an event like this before with such possible far reaching consequences which is why it needs something like 'unless it is declared a pandemic by the WHO.' Even then you need to prove that your business has been directly affected by that event and not some other event which just happens to coincide with the pandemic. It is easy if you have a fire on your premises but much harder with such a nebulous event as this. It is easy for you to see the effect but that is not the point. Bear in mind that you will not be the only one in this situation. Have you discussed this with your broker? That is the way to go not with the insurer and if your broker is telling you that insurers are wriggling, are you sure it is not your broker?
Business interruption insurance was never very well understood in my day by the average clerk and for this sort of event it will probably need intervention at the highest level and it will take time for a decision to be reached.
I am not particularly defending insurers but trying to steer a middle course. Most insurers do not wriggle and in any case have you never heard of fiddling of insurance claims by the public? That is the other side of the coin. People think that insurers have a bottomless pit of money.
Dod
Dod,
Yes I am in communication with our broker. Yes to senior people. Yes I understand all your points and am used to human nature. No it took very little time for a decision : by now they have the teflon phrases off pat.
I can see the wording in the policy. Indeed it does exclude WHO pandemics. Actually it includes almost nothing.
Personally I am not at all surprised. As I reached to check our insurance a while back I predicted that it would not pay out. I commented as much in advance here.
What has become apparent is that the "notifiable diseases" extension was not intended to be useful to businesses such as ours - quite how an empty steel building with steel machinery in it might get closed down by a local authority plague inspector is beyond me. That cover extension is really intended for food & accomodation & similar venues. Quite why the broker advised & sold that extension to us is interesting. However it is not something I shall lose sleep over.
The reality is I expect my insurer and my broker to both work together in finding a way not to pay out on any claim. I'm afraid that is a view I have formed over years of dealing with the whole industry. As a result the sensible course of action would be to use legal minimum cover from cheapskate & sons r us. Why go with the topline pukka merchants why they are just as slippery ? (we do, but we ask ourselves why)
Like I say, my main focus is keeping our people employed. The reason I am taking the time to explain my experiences in this respect is that, given that I am one of the better insured businesses, then - as my insurer says : no one will be covered. Irrespective of what government says. And it is best that this understanding gets out.
regards, dspp
dspp
It is too easy to blame others. Surely you read your insurance contract? If you wanted it to cover a worldwide pandemic, you should have asked your broker to arrange this. It might have been expensive, because you would have had to specify the current situation exactly.
Would you be surprised, if one of your customers complained that the product you had delivered wasn’t twice the specification you had agreed in writing?
In general, major insurers didn’t have to be bailed out in 2008 except for AIG (run by a dubious character) because they had taken the trouble to ensure their risk analyses were of the highest quality. I suspect that Zurich Insurance applies the highest standards of financial probity. Hopefully small businesses do too.
regards
Howard
