Buildings insurance - Providing proof

Before your insurer is prepared to settle, you may have to supply proof of the validity of your claim. If your home is damaged by bad weather, you may need to convince your insurer that your house was in a good state of repair by getting a builder’s opinion as to what caused the damage, or by providing a recent invoice to show that you had just had work done on your house. To succeed with a claim for severe-weather damage, you may also need to provide expert proof, which you can get – for a small charge – by phoning the Met Office Insurance Consultancy (for England and Wales), the Scottish Climate Office (for Scotland and parts of England on the Scottish border), or the Belfast Climate Office (for Northern Ireland). If the damage to your home was as a result of an earth tremor (not unknown in the UK), you can get expert proof from the Global Seismology and Geomagnetism Group of the British Geological Survey.