Business protection insurance

As an insurer or insurance broker, you may market or sell business protection insurance under one of these labels:

• Professional indemnity insurance
• Employer's liability insurance 
• Public liability insurance 
• Product liability insurance
• Contractor's liability insurance 
• Goods in transit insurance 
• Business interruption insurance  
• Property owner's liability 
• Commercial legal expenses insurance 
• Landlord’s rent guarantee insurance
• Tailored cover 

Small business customers – including companies, sole traders, partnerships and charities – come to us when they feel their insurer declined a claim unfairly. This might be because:

• they’re unhappy with the amount offered to settle the claim
• they believe the insurer has taken too long to deal with their claim, or
• they believe they were mis-sold the policy, either by the insurer or a broker.

You may have turned down a business protection insurance claim because:

• there’s a dispute about how, when or whether the insured event happened
• the claim isn’t covered by the terms and conditions in the insurance policy
• the claimant made their claim late
• the policy only provided cover for a period of time, and the event that your customer is claiming for is outside that period,
• you believe the customer was underinsured
• the customer didn’t provide the correct or adequate information when they took out their policy

Landlord’s rent protection

You may have declined a claim for landlord’s rent protection because:

• there were problems with the underlying tenancy agreement or eviction notices served
• the policy only provided cover where the loss of rent was caused by a specific event, which you don’t believe has occurred

There are time limits which affect whether we can deal with a complaint. When you receive a complaint, you should reply to your customer within eight weeks. T

If you don’t – or the customer disagrees with your response – they can bring their complaint to us. We’ll check it’s something we can deal with and, if it is, we’ll investigate.

Terms for different types of business protection policy will vary – as will the circumstances of each complaint. We want to determine what’s fair and reasonable in every case.

So, we’ll expect you to show us you’ve investigated the complaint thoroughly and have reflected carefully on the circumstances.

Find out more about resolving complaints

To reach a decision about what’s fair and reasonable, we’ll consider the rules, standards, codes and good practice that were in force when the incident took place. That includes:

• the relevant law and regulations
• any regulator’s rules and guidance
• any industry codes of conduct
• what we consider was good industry practice

For example, if the incident was after 31 July 2023, we might consider the new requirements of the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA’s) Consumer Duty. That means we’d look at whether you’d treated your customer fairly, as well whether the product they’re complaining about suited their needs.

The Consumer Duty isn’t retrospective so wouldn’t apply to complaints about events before 31 July 2023.

If there are disagreements about the facts, we’ll base our decision about what happened on evidence from you, your customer and relevant third parties.

If we decide you’ve made a mistake or treated the customer unfairly, we’ll ask you to put things right. Our general approach is that you should put the customer back into the position they’d have been in if the problem hadn’t happened. So, for example, we might ask you to pay a claim that was previously rejected, or to recalculate the value of the claim.

We may also ask you to compensate them for any inconvenience they’ve experienced and to pay interest on top of any award we make. We’d expect you to apply a suitable rate of interest to the amount you refund your customer to cover the days a customer was out of pocket.

Our Business Support Hub can help you reach fair outcomes for your customers by giving guidance on how we approach complaints. You can talk informally to the Business Support Hub about a complaint you’ve received, or for guidance on our rules and how we work.

Contact the Business Support Hub

• Search ombudsman decisions
• Business interruption insurance on the FCA website
• Insurance for small businesses from the Association of British Insurers (ABI)
• See our approach to resolving BII complaints related to the Covid-19 pandemic

If you’re a small business, sole trader, partnership or charity, find out how we can help you with a complaint about business protection insurance.