Escape of water accounts for 24% of home insurance claims in the UK. It’s the single most common source of loss across household policies, and yet the industry’s approach to handling it has barely evolved.
That’s not a technology problem. It’s a structural one.
When water appears through a ceiling or starts lifting a floor, the visible damage is only part of the story. The source is hidden and the claim can’t progress until it’s found. And the moment you introduce multiple parties to find it, expose it and fix it, each operating independently, you’ve already set the conditions for delay.
The industry has accepted this as normal. I don’t think it should.
Where control can be lost
Trace and Access is where most escape of water claims are either brought under control or allowed to drift. It involves locating the source of a leak and creating the access needed to expose it, with policy cover typically applying to the cost of finding and exposing the issue, not the repair itself.
In a fragmented model, this drift is almost inevitable. Often a leak detection specialist attends to identify the source, a second contractor creates the access, a third carries out the repair and a fourth is appointed to reinstate the damage, or the claim is cash settled. Each stage is treated in isolation, with no single party accountable for the outcome.
In some cases, the policyholder is asked to resolve the problem entirely and submit evidence, pushing them into an unregulated market where quality and cost vary significantly.
They can struggle to locate the right contractor and ultimately are exposed to companies who see the Trace and Access policy limit as a blank cheque. Where contractors can see the limit of policy cover, there’s a tendency to charge to that limit regardless of the actual scope of work. This results in insurers covering claims that shouldn’t be validated, and at significant cost.
Part of the problem sits in the triage process that deploys specialist contractors by default rather than as the targeted resource they are, adding cost and time from the outset.
The incentive structure doesn’t help either. Insurer-managed contractor networks are often optimised for cost control rather than speed or capability, which means the model is working exactly as designed, just not in the policyholder’s interest.
This isn’t a failure of any individual service. It’s a failure of how the services are sequenced and owned.
Trace and Access has been treated as a standalone activity rather than the opening phase of a complete reinstatement. Once you separate detection from repair, you create a gap, and gaps fill with delay, miscommunication and avoidable cost.
In our latest Insights article, Lee Sadowski, our CSO, challenges the assumption at the heart of the traditional model and sets out what a more integrated approach looks like in practice, what the numbers show and the questions every insurer should be asking of their Trace and Access provider.
Read the Full Article (PDF)