Home Sanity check: what’s a “comprehensive” home insurance?

[PandPs]

Bit of a weird one here.

I’m a home owner. Home is insured with FBD. Signed up direct with them on their website. As far as I know, it’s a completely bog standard insurance policy. The schedule includes

• Building and Contents
• Liability protection
• Home emergency assistance

It explicitly doesn’t include:

• Sports equipment
• All risks (which is insuring personal items outside of the home)
• Personal accident

I sent it to Bank of Ireland (mortgage provider) who wrote back with the following:

However, we would like to bring to your attention that the policy provided to us is noted as "Fire, specified covers and accidental damage" rather than comprehensive cover.


For your financial protection, and to ensure your mortgage is fully covered in the event of a claim, we recommend that you confirm directly with FBD that your policy provides comprehensive cover including all perils. This ensures that, in the event of damage, your property and mortgage security are adequately protected.

Now I’m confused. I can’t see on the schedule that I’ve opted out of anything other than the irrelevant stuff. And I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have opted out of anything when signing up - I just picked the standard policy FBD offers on their site. The only tweaks I made was to adjust the amounts insured and excess. There’s no mention of “comprehensive” anywhere and I’ve never heard the term for a home insurance.

Am I missing something here? Is BoI correct in their assessment? Am I actually not properly covered somehow?

 

[DirectDevil]

I suspect that insurers/agents/brokers/others use "comprehensive" as a term of art that means virtually nothing of itself.
The same applies to the timeworn notion of "fully comprehensive" motor insurance .
These products tend to be fully comprehensive until you subtract the exceptions, conditions and other limitations.
Even household insurance policies underwritten on an "accidental cover" basis have numerous exceptions !

A policyholder needs to swim through the ocean of conditionality to satisfy themselves that the cover provided is what they actually need.
Silly though it might sound the safest thing to do is to express your uncertainty to FBD and ask them to actually set out, in writing, precisely what your policy with them actually covers.

As far BoI are concerned I suspect that their financial interest only extends to cover their exposure to loss or damage to the insured property that is the subject of the mortgage agreement. The range of BoI's interests may not coincide with that of the individual policyholder and that can cause confusion for the client.

Put more crudely, BoI are only and properly interested in covering their interests under the mortgage. Anything beyond that is purely a matter for the client according to their needs.

This was a good question.

 

[ClubMan]

Put more crudely, BoI are only and properly interested in covering their interests under the mortgage.

In that case why do they seem to have a problem here when the property is covered for fire and damage? What sort of cover is missing that they need?

However, we would like to bring to your attention that the policy provided to us is noted as "Fire, specified covers and accidental damage" rather than comprehensive cover.

For your financial protection, and to ensure your mortgage is fully covered in the event of a claim, we recommend that you confirm directly with FBD that your policy provides comprehensive cover including all perils. This ensures that, in the event of damage, your property and mortgage security are adequately protected

 

[Freelance]

In times past, the majority of Property insurance was actually Fire cover only. Few if any other perils were covered. Sometime around the middle of the last century additional covers such as contents, accidental damage, property owner's liability etc started to became popular among householders, but were usually arranged separately. Eventually "Householders Comprehensive" policies incorporating some or all of the additional covers/perils in a single policy started to appear. I've never seen a precise definition as to what a "Householders Comprehensive" policy should include, so the BOI letter is a bit odd. I would have expected them to set out precisely what additional cover it is that they want to see in place. You could ask them, it would be interesting to know if because of previous experience there is a cover/peril that they believe to be standard which FBD omit/exclude.

 

[ClubMan]

In times past, the majority of Property insurance was actually Fire cover only

I thought that the base cover was always fire and accidental damage (to the property - not contents)?

I still don't understand what BOI are getting at from the snippet in the original post and why exactly they think that the cover isn't adequate to insure three asset on which they've secured the mortgage.