What you tell your insurer when you take out cover decides what they can later refuse to pay

When you take out or renew a landlord policy, the insurer is pricing it and deciding whether to offer cover at all on the strength of what you tell it. The law doesn't leave what you owe the insurer to guesswork about what a form happens to ask.

What a fair presentation means

Where the Insurance Act 2015 applies, you must give the insurer a fair presentation of the risk before cover starts. That means disclosing every material circumstance you know or ought to know, set out clearly enough that the insurer can understand it without having to dig (legislation.gov.uk, read 30 September 2026). Answering the specific questions on a proposal form isn't the whole of it. The duty covers anything relevant to the risk that those questions didn't happen to ask.

What counts as a material circumstance

A circumstance is material if it would affect an insurer's decision to take on the risk, or the terms it offers. For a let property that can include things a landlord might not think to mention: a previous claim on the property, a tenant with a poor payment history, work the property needs, or periods the property has stood empty. Whether a particular fact is material depends on the risk being insured, which is why the pages on this site covering loss of rent, rent guarantee and unoccupancy each set out the circumstances most likely to matter for that cover.

What you know, and what you ought to know

Actual knowledge is straightforward: facts you're aware of when you arrange the policy. "Ought to know" goes further. It covers what a reasonable search of information available to you would have turned up, including facts held by anyone managing the letting on your behalf, such as a letting agent. A landlord who inherited a property or let it because it wouldn't sell may hold less of that history than someone who has managed the same let for years, which is its own reason to ask what the previous owner or agent knows before the policy is arranged, not after. The guide on letting a home you did not plan to let sets out what else to check in that position.

What to ask before you disclose anything

• Has anything happened at the property, or with the tenancy, that the proposal form didn't directly ask about?
• Does anyone else involved in managing the let, such as a letting agent, know something you don't?
• Is there a previous claim, period of unoccupancy, or tenant history connected to the property rather than to you personally?

Where you're unsure whether something counts, the safer course is to put it to the insurer and let it decide.

An insurer that decides a presentation was not fair cannot simply turn the claim down. The Insurance Act 2015 sets out exactly what the insurer may do, and which remedy applies depends on how the breach is classified: whether it was deliberate or reckless, or something less than that.

Where the breach was deliberate or reckless

If the insurer treats the non-disclosure or misrepresentation as deliberate or reckless, the remedy is the most severe the Act allows.

"The insurer may avoid the contract and refuse all claims, and need not return any of the premiums paid." (Schedule 1, Insurance Act 2015)

In practice this means the policy is treated as if it had never existed, and whatever premium you paid stays with the insurer. The insurer carries the burden of showing the breach was deliberate or reckless.

Where the breach was not deliberate or reckless

If the breach falls short of deliberate or reckless, the Act asks a different question: what would the insurer have done if the presentation had been fair? The answer fixes the remedy, and there are three possible outcomes.

• The insurer would not have offered cover at all. It may avoid the contract and refuse all claims, but it must return the premiums you paid.
• The insurer would have offered cover, but on different terms. The contract is treated as if it had been written on those different terms from the outset, so a claim can be assessed against them.
• The insurer would have offered cover at a higher premium. The claim is reduced in proportion to the shortfall between the premium you actually paid and the premium that would have been charged.

None of these outcomes lets the insurer refuse the claim outright or keep the whole premium without good reason. The remedy has to match what the underwriting evidence shows the insurer would actually have done.

What ICOBS says about rejecting a claim

The FCA's rules for insurers on claims handling, set out in the Insurance Conduct of Business Sourcebook (ICOBS), require a claim to be handled promptly and fairly. A rejection on the grounds of non-disclosure has to rest on a genuine qualifying breach under the Insurance Act 2015, applied through one of the remedies above.

If a claim is turned down or reduced on these grounds, it's worth asking the insurer which of these remedies it is applying, and on what basis it decided what it would have done had the presentation been fair. That answer should be traceable to underwriting evidence.