| Home Insurance in the United Kingdom Many Uk home owners have had their building insurance UK polices arranged by their mortgage lenders and until recently, it is fair to say that most home insurance in the UK was written via Mortgage lenders who tried to tie in customers at the mortgage stage by including home buildings & contents cover. Many made it a condition of the loan that you had to take buy building insurance cover with them, of course, you were free to arrange your own home contents insurance but many homeowners saw this as inconvenient and just opted to include contents under the buildings insurance wording. Lenders reasons for trying to include Home buildings & contents insurance with a mortgage were two fold. Economically, it made good sense, they had a consumer who needed cover that they were already doing business with and a strong passive income could be made by selling ancillary products of the back of a mortgage.
Secondly and more importantly lenders have always wanted to protect their financial interest in a property by making sure that adequate insurance protection is in force at all times. This seems perfectly reasonable, after all if you had just lent someone a few hundred thousand pounds, you would want to make sure that your loan was protected in everyway possible. Many lenders saw the outsourcing of building insurance beyond their own home insurance panel as a loss of control, after all, what would happen if the policyholder simply forgot to renew the policy and there was a serious loss at the property.
Nowadays lenders are more relaxed about allowing individuals to arrange their own home insurance polices. The council for mortgage lenders produce a handbook and state that anyone making their own arraignments for home insurance, must make sure that the policy covers all of the perils as stated in the handbook. The vast majority of home insurance polices do and if you have the ability to analysis twenty Uk home insurance policy wordings from a range of uk insurers you will notice that the core policy wordings are almost identical. All offer a broad range of insurance perils covering such things as fires and floods extra and most only differ by the peripheral covers they have on offer.
In some cases, you may have to pay your lender a small fee to arrange your policy elsewhere, they say this is to pay for the extra work created by outsourcing your policy and to a certain extend this is true, a society or lender may wish to check each year that your policy is still in force, in reality this never happens, they usually make the insure or broker sign a declaration stating that in the event of non renewal, they will be notified and given the option of paying the premium on your behalf.
Lastly they will insist that on your home schedule of insurance, their name will be listed. This is to satisfy the contract rights act 1999, which states that for anyone to receive the benefit of an insurance policy, they must be listed on it.
Uk home insurance, is one of the easiest insurance contracts to obtain, in fact many people now say that most companies seem to advertise on the Internet, the choice is too large and it is very difficult to actually find a company that will give you the best premium. Well, performing this task is where your traditional home insurance broker have managed to assist customers over at least the last 40 years. Most home insurance brokers will deal with a large number of UK insurance companies, they will have a proprietary computer system that will check the rates from these insurers and they can then make a recommendation to you as to a suitable contract. of course you are free to do your own research, but remember, you are not an expert and by just going to one company, you will usually only receive their own quote and their opinion on their own product and no one elses. By contacting an insurance broker you will be able to receive their advice and opinion on a whole range of products. Most research points to the fact that sourcing your Uk home insurance via a broker doesn't actually cost you more money. True they are paid a commission from insurance companies to produce business, but many argue that the broker does a great deal of work to assist in the production of the home policy document. Id the broker doesn't do this work, some one has to do it and direct insurers have to employ staff themselves which of course, indirectly, is the same as paying a commission. By using an insurance broker to source your Uk home insurance cover, you will benefit from their expertise and you can often leave the research work in their capable hands whilst spending your own time on some thing more worthwhile.
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