Our 2024 Insurance renewal is now complete

We have now completed negotiations for the renewal of our group insurance policies on 25th March 2024.

Each of our insurers, Zurich and Ecclesiastical, has re-assessed pricing for each building on its own merits.

Zurich has offered small rate reductions on a wide selection of buildings, particularly those carrying the highest rates because of safety defects or other adverse features.

Ecclesiastical’s rates will remain largely unchanged, having offered savings when they started insuring part of our portfolio in 2022.

A small number of buildings will have rate increases, where individual circumstances require it. This can be for instance where the presence of fire safety defects was discovered after the last renewal.

Terrorism rates for properties in the lower risk zones, B, C and D, have reduced by on average 15%. Higher risk Zone A rates are unchanged.

Unfortunately, inflation indexation does eat into these reductions. Both insurers have recommended indexation of 3.8% next year. This is reduced from 10% last year, since the rate of inflation for building materials and labour has reduced.

Our brokers have conducted a limited tender exercise this year, and a number of individual properties have been offered to alternative insurers. Generally this process did not achieve more economic premiums and buildings have remained with the current insurers.

Our rationale for how frequently we tender our portfolio is discussed elsewhere in these FAQ’s.

The market for residential blocks remains difficult. Pricing in the sector should ease however as fire safety defects in buildings across the UK are remediated. Pricing even for buildings without safety defects has been influenced by overall insurer sentiment. We do not expect premiums to return to historic levels. Insurers generally consider residential property to have been widely under-priced in the past, based on what is now known about the scale of safety defects across the country.

We will continue to do everything possible to ease the burden of premium levels in the future.

Your freeholder receives a commission from insurers for the work its Insurance Department does to support the programme. The level of commission reduced in 2023, for the fourth year running, in view of the historically high premium levels applying across the UK insurance market.

We will shortly send out this year’s invoices and insurance certificates. If you anticipate difficulty in settling your invoice, please contact our Late Payments Team, (not the Insurance Team) as soon as possible after renewal on 25th March.

This year, our brokers and insurers are required by the Financial Conduct Authority to provide leaseholders with more information about insurance programmes. This information will be provided by us when the renewal has been concluded, Where the information is common to our whole portfolio (for example a summary of the cover provided), the information will be available on our website. Where the detail is property specific, it will be e-mailed or sent by post, either by ourselves or your managing agent.

Further detailed information is available on this section of the website. Please note that we are not able to enter individual correspondence where questions are answered by the website material.