Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday’s ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket. Find out how to contact him below.
D.P. writes: We run a small country pub in Herefordshire, and due to the forced closure, we are struggling to make ends meet. We do have pandemic insurance, but our insurers are refusing to pay out. I paid the premium, now it feels like the insurers don’t give a damn.
Our reader was insured with Lloyd’s of London syndicate DTW1991
I am sure the insurers do give a damn – about their own bank balance, but not yours. They represent everything that is stinking and rotten in the insurance industry.
They were happy to pocket your premiums, providing cover against a disaster they thought would never happen, and now that it has happened, they try to convince you that your policy does not really mean what it says.
You are insured with Lloyd’s of London syndicate DTW1991 and your policy covers ‘business interruption’ caused by events that include public health closure arising from ‘contagious or infectious human disease, an outbreak of which a competent public authority has stipulated shall be notified to them, manifested by any person whilst at the premises or within a 25-mile radius of it’.
But when you made a claim, the Lloyd’s syndicate called in loss adjusters Woodgate and Clark. They decided that you had not lost a penny because of Covid-19.
Instead, loss adjuster Ian Hartley ruled: ‘Your closure has occurred as a result of a downturn in trade due to the general Government guidance on social distancing etc.’ In other words, if you unlocked your doors, your customers would stay away anyway. In any case, they added, cover only kicks in if there has been a case of the virus on your premises.
This last ruling was quite simply 100 per cent nonsense, and the loss adjusters later admitted this. They then shifted their ground, with Hartley claiming: ‘The premises were not ordered to close by a competent authority as a consequence of any specific local occurrence.’
Impartial? Jane Nicholson of the Lloyd’s syndicate
There is no such wording in your policy. This is a term dreamed up by Hartley and his firm. I challenged them to justify it, but they offered no explanation. Do they really believe that the Government’s closure order to all pubs has to include a town-by-town listing of all Covid-19 cases in order to be valid? Or do they just find it easier to add a new condition to your policy after the event?
With Woodgate and Clark’s shaky ground for rejecting your claim, you asked the actual insurers, Lloyd’s syndicate DTW1991, to reconsider. Unbelievably, Jane Nicholson told you: ‘I have conducted an independent investigation of your complaint.’
Why unbelievable? Because Jane Nicholson is a senior figure at DTW1991, the people who should be paying out on your policy. How she can claim to be independent is a total mystery that she and her employers refused to explain.
Nicholson also decided that your policy would only apply if the Government specifically closed your pub because of a local outbreak of Covid-19. Logically, this seems to mean that if there were a hundred cases in your area, plus one case elsewhere, then DTW1991 would refuse to pay out because the virus had ceased to be local.
In the crazy world of Lloyd’s of London, Nicholson even says she does not believe ‘that there is any obvious reason why specific cases of Covid-19 within the 25-mile radius would have caused interruption to your business.’
Really? As I write, the latest figures available for Herefordshire show well over 400 cases and almost 50 deaths. I suspect that even if there was not a single case anywhere else in the world, your pub and almost every other business in the county would have been closed.
Santander blow for scouts
Ms I.D. writes: I am Treasurer of a local Scout Group, and we have hit a brick wall with Santander, which now has the account we originally opened with the Post Office. As Santander did not offer online dual signatures, which we need, we opened accounts at Lloyds. We left £15,900 deposited with Santander, and unknown to us, Santander decided this was dormant and blocked it.
‘I am Treasurer of a local Scout Group, and we have hit a brick wall with Santander’
You found Santander rejected Gift Aid payments that arrived from Revenue & Customs, and even bounced a cheque that you issued. Things got even worse when Santander told you its records were incomplete, meaning you could not transfer the money to Lloyds. This problem is not unusual with voluntary organisations.
Bank signatories move away or retire, and over time contact is lost. The last transaction on your Santander account was in 2016, and the bank made the account dormant a year later, when it received no reply to correspondence.
However, you did manage to supply proof of identity from two of three possible signatories. That should have been enough to reopen the account. I asked staff at the bank’s head office to look into this, and they agree the account should have been revived. It has now been brought back to life, and Santander has added backdated interest plus a further £100 by way of an apology.
Nicholson does at least accept that your losses have been caused by the regulations that closed your business. But she fails to acknowledge that this forced closure was not some whim of Boris Johnson’s, but a direct result of Covid-19.
But what really takes the biscuit is Nicholson’s final reason for turning you down. She points out that your policy excludes cover for ‘pollution or contamination’ and, she says, ‘the presence of Covid-19 may be considered contamination’.
If Nicholson really believes this then she has found a reason to reject any claim by any policyholder whose business is closed on similar health grounds. And that means she and her mates can pocket premiums for insurance that does not exist.
Not all businesses have business interruption insurance, but of those that do, so many have reported that their claims have been rejected that this has become a scandal even in the eyes of the Financial Conduct Authority.
Meanwhile, Woodgate and Clark, and Lloyd’s syndicate DTW1991, have done nothing but reduce the reputation of their own industry. Shame on them.
If you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony Hetherington at Financial Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS or email [email protected].
Because of the high volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given. Please send only copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned.
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