While insurance can often prove invaluable in covering the costs involved if your car is stolen, your home is damaged or your flights are cancelled – among many other factors, depending on the type of insurance taken out – there will occasionally be errors or other eventualities that mean policyholders are unsatisfied with the performance of their insurance company. It may be that the insurance company is being too slow to process a claim, or that a claim has been rejected on what you consider to be false grounds.

If you are considering making a claim based on the performance of your insurance company there are a few things you can do. However, the very first thing you should do if you have an issue is to check your documents thoroughly, to confirm that you are truly entitled to the claims you have made. It may be the case that the policy has changed in the years since you first signed up, or that you were mistaken and your insurer is within its rights to reject your claim as invalid.

If you are satisfied that your claim is valid though, you should write a formal letter to the head office of your insurance company, or get in touch with them via email or telephone. If you are going to send a letter, it could be an idea to send it by recorded delivery. When you contact the head office, outline the details of your complaint, making sure you quote the time and date of the incident in question, as well as any subsequent phone calls or other correspondence you’ve had with the company over the matter. If you send any documents to prove your position, ensure that these are copies rather than the original.

If you do not receive a reply, or are unsatisfied with the one you do receive, it could be time to take your complaint to higher authorities. In the UK, this most commonly means the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), who sort out individual complaints that consumers and financial businesses haven


About the author

Paul is a part of the digital blogging team at cashzilla.co.uk who work with brands like LV=. For more information about me, or to keep up to date with the latest in finance news, check out my posts at cashzilla.co.uk or visit my Twitter account, @cashzilla.