The UK Insurance Blog

What with the new university terms set to start, the article “Freshers’ week means rich pickings for burglars” couldn’t be better timed. It is about time students had some help protecting their belongings, they will certainly have their hands full in the weeks ahead.

Shockingly, one in three students will become a victim of the dreaded ubiquitous burglar, which is all the more reason for security to be upped and contents insurance to be in place. Burglars see students at rich pickings on account of their bountiful possessions. Let’s face it, students accumulate expensive gadgets like there’s no tomorrow!

Saga Insurance have a free ‘Student Survival’ guide book to help students help themselves as well as offering really handy contents packages. The most important feature it offers is that windows and doors in student digs are checked for security which is the main point of entry for thieves as well as other ways to drastically reduce the occurrence of burglary.

The people at Saga have, if you have a contents package with them, added on to your insurance package a student appendage offering up to £3,500 protection for your children’s valuable possessions. This will entitle you to cover when possessions are in transit as well as at the new students accommodation. What will definitely appeal is that downloaded music and items of a digital content are also protected.

Before you move in permanently to your new student accommodation, check out the security of the building looking out for security lights, locks and burglar alarms. Marking all belongings with a UV marker is highly recommended as well as lights on timer switches (to give the impression you are home) and getting your student possession insurance in place.

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The article “Brits leave personal goods unattended in holiday homes” highlights the fact that holiday home owners are leaving valuable belongings unattended at their own risk.

Our holiday homes are not secure! Containing collectively, over £6.3 billion worth of personal possessions and valuables, it comes as a surprise to learn that holiday home protection is not adequately provided for.

The company Zurich Private Clients are observing a pattern where their affluent clients are being targeted for burglary even when they are occupying their second homes. It seems a popular trick is to release gas into the air con system so that they can steal valuables without the victims resisting.

People with second homes are not paying attention to insurance. About one in ten have no contents insurance for their holiday home and eleven percent have claimed they have no idea if their insurance is adequate.

Holiday home owners, for some reason, seem to be a little cavalier about their security arrangements. Basic practices like fitting locks on the windows are being ignored. Don’t tell anyone, but 6% have admitted to no security at all. The message the insurance companies want to put out is that even though a holiday home is secondary their security protection should be afforded just as much attention as their first home.

They are left empty for the majority of the year, sometimes for months at a time. Two thirds of people with holiday homes claim to visit them no more often than every three months. Although offering out the holiday home to friends and relatives, many of these holiday-homers admit their homes quite often remain empty for at least a month at a time. When holiday homes in Britain have contents to the average value of £15,200, it comes as a big surprise that they have such a slap dash attitude to their belongings. Despite this however, when quizzed they claimed they were worried about the security of their holiday home, particularly of local crime and their empty house being targeted by criminals.

Never before has property been at a premium for the buyers of the UK holiday home market. Apparently, we can’t get enough! Even if we haven’t the time to enjoy our second properties for more than twice a year, we still can’t resist investing in them!

These holiday-homers – they just don’t seem to get enough! Around 18% of holiday home owners are actively seeking more properties and forty seven per cent of these are ready to purchase in 2008.

Countries that are the most popular with purchasers of holiday homes are France and Spain (24% and 26% respectively). Other destinations moving up the ranks include Cyprus and Bulgaria. Twenty five per cent of people who are hoping to buy a holiday home in the near future are thinking about purchasing somewhere in the United Kingdom. Half the holiday home buyers are hoping to find their dream home on the continent while twenty five per cent want to find somewhere outside of Europe.

What with all the Big Brother 9 mayhem going on, at times you’d be forgiven for wondering how much the Big Brother house costs to insure. An article published recently in PR Web shines a little light on the matter.

This is one unpredictable house. You never know what’s going to go wrong. One thing you are sure of, that something WILL go wrong! Furniture often gets wrecked, accidents happen and tomfoolery is at its worst as the world sits back in its favourite armchair and watches the foolhardy shenanigans of the Big Brother housemates. To all intents and purposes the contents of the house are designer label or specially crafted for the year’s intake, so what would the creators have to pay out for house insurance. In the article, ‘Confused dot com’ provide some answers.

One positive point is that flooding is not a problem, despite all efforts by the raucous inmates. The location of the famed Big Brother house is beside the Elstree film studio water tank where Moby Dick was filmed. There is not likely to be any flooding, so no flood risk added to the insurance cover. Good start.

Smoking is not allowed in the Big Brother 9 house, so it’s a home insurance quote for a non-smoking household. In actuality, the local council defines the Big Brother house a place of work, in which case, if a contestant was to smoke indoors, the programme would have to fork out £2,500 each time it happens.

The security of the Big Brother house is not a problem. While many houses rely on a security alarm system, window locks and double locks galore, the BB house has 24 hour seven days a week security monitoring via CCTV as well as security guards and dogs.

Contents insurance is set at an amount much less than normal at £50,000. In the Big Brother house, there are no accumulated personal items although furniture and appliances are usually top notch expensive items.

To top it all off, Big Brother’s building is insured for £500,000 which is equal to the build value.

All in all, things could be a lot worse for the money people at Big Brother!

An interesting piece in yesterday’s Telegraph talking about how easy it is forget that the contents of our houses increases over time. They’re reporting that it’s not unusual for claims adjusters to reduce a claim by as much as 50% simply because the contents of the house were underinsured. They state that “Figures published by Abbey last year show that 257,000 of all home insurance policies, across both building and contents cover, were declined as a result of underinsurance.” I can’t believe that the claims were totally disallowed, the normal procedure is to reduce the claim by the percentage of under valuation. Thus if I take out contents insurance that provides cover for £30,000 and the insurance assessor value the contents of the house at £60,000 then you should only expect to be paid half of the amount that you claim.

The article also points out that there is a wide difference in the blanket cover (i.e. the contents not individually valued and listed) offered by the leading insurance companies. Direct Line’s basic policy offers £15,000 of unspecified item cover whereas More Than has the limit set at £75,000. Once more it’s telling us that we should research all insurance cover before making a final choice. Product loyalty is often misplaced, one company could have the best value car insurance whereas their home insurance sucks…always take a few minutes to do some research. You’ll find a wide choice of insurers on the home insurance pages of the website.