Widespread misconceptions could mean your home insurance policy isn’t up to scratch

Do you want to tell us a bit more about that?

Yeah, so it's about 3 in 10.

So depending on the type of product that you have, so whether it's a combined buildings and contents policy or a contents-only policy or a buildings policy, the decline rates range between 38%, sort of the highest, and 29% at the At the lowest.

So that's worse than best.

Yes.

And for the majority of people, it's sort of 29% because that's the combined policies, which most people have.

So that's about three in 10.

So yeah, that's where that figure comes from.

Sorry, that's the SCA's figures.

Yes, that's from the Financial Conduct Authority.

And we'll dig in on some more of these stats soon.

But just to bring another stat to the attention as well, because I guess if a claim is declined, the next step for a lot of people is to go to the FOS, the Financial Ombudsman Service.

So this is the independent resolution body.

You've got some startling figures from there as well, haven't you?

Yeah, so as you mentioned, if you have any kind of dispute, so it doesn't have to be that your claim's declined, but if you're unhappy with how the insurer's treated you, you make a complaint with them.

And then if you're unhappy with how that complaint winds up, then the next step is to go to the FOS.

The FOS, Financial Ombudsman Service, they receive and deal with thousands of complaints every year.

So what we thought we would do this time is we sent them a freedom of information request to find out what types of complaints they were dealing with in the home insurance space.

And tell us more, what did they come back with?

So the top three kinds of complaints were, the top one, this probably isn't going to be hugely surprising, is ones about declined claims.

Then after that, it was claimed delays and claimed values.

So these kind of varied in terms of how they ranked, depending on whether they were buildings claims or content claims.

But those were kind of the big three in terms of how much they received.

But then what we also were kind of interested in was how often they would side with the customer in resolving the complaint.

And they were most likely to uphold the complaint when it came to one that was about a delay.