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Review of the Policy Expert, Home insurance:

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Claiming with this company financially ruined us

Initially, when we brought our insurance policy we saw all the positive reviews, we now realise these were all from people who had yet to claim on their insurance. Once you see reviews of those attempting to claim they often become negative. We had a house fire in 2022, in our family there's was husband and I (at this point I was 3 months pregnant) and our two children (3 years and 10 months old). Our kitchen was badly damaged and we had smoke damage throughout the rest of the property. When we called the emergency line the first man we spoke to could not find our insurance policy, despite us telling him the policy number (it turned out he was searching the wrong date despite being repeatedly told the correct one). This meant we got referred to someone else who eventually called us in the middle of the night. We were left with no emergency accommodation and no where to go. The next day we managed to find a family member who would let us stay with them, as the insurance company had now phoned back and said they would reimburse us for a few nights in a hotel, however they could not tell us what an acceptable cost was and we would just have to pay and see if they would cover the cost (we could not afford this). It took a week for the cleaning team to come. They were meant to clean the property and write a list of contents which could not be salvaged (but not remove any structual contents. Due to the fire damaged kitchen staying in situ we had to call the team out an additional two times due to soot moving around the house. The cleaning team also told us our children's toys were safe, however once inspected they were covered in soot and we had to argue and even go to management to get them to replace the toys. We had the same issue with multiple other items, including our children's bed and cot. They offered to pay the rent on a flat, however we would have to pay both our household bills and those on the flat, which again we could not afford. Due to this we were forced to move our family back into the smoke damaged property with no boiler, we had no heating and no hot water. Eventually due to endless issues we got changed to a new case handler who seemed to be helping, until it came to the surveyors report. It took 2 months for the first surveyor to come and view the damage. After this it took weeks to get the report back, we then realised it was completely wrong. He said our kitchen had items it didn't/didn't have items it did, he even missed off that the boiler was ruined. It then took another week for another surveyor to come round who agreed the report was wrong. The insurance company said they never got the second surveyors report. At this point we started being ignored by our case handler and every single contact in the company we had, so we took to social media and pleaded online for a response, we then found a lot of others were doing the same. They eventually agreed their report was wrong in early August. Then the settlement offer they gave was unreasonably low, however, they would not budge on it. We ended up having to do all the redecoration and ripping out of the kitchen on our own as we couldn't afford to pay someone else to do it and pay for a new kitchen with fitting. We eventually got the decoration completed and kitchen put in a few weeks before our baby was born. Our kitchen burning down was horrific, but the treatment of this company financially broke us and used all our savings, not to mention the months my children had to be in a house surrounded by soot because weren't allowed to rip out the kitchen because otherwise they wouldn't pay us for it and we couldn't afford to live else where. My son has since developed asthma and every complaint to this company has been fobbed off. Take this as a warning and do not insure with them. Reviewed on: 4th December 2022

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