Just had my renewal through from Aviva for the house insurance, up 22% on last year with no claims and no changes to the property. I rang them and got the usual spiel about rising rebuild costs and increased weather event frequency, which I suppose is fair enough in the abstract but doesn’t explain why my specific premium on a post-war semi that has never flooded needs to go up by that much.
I have been running quotes through comparison sites over the weekend and the best I can find is still about 15% more than what I paid last year. LV came in cheapest but with a higher excess than I would like. Admiral were competitive but wanted to add legal cover as a default which I had to manually remove.
Is anyone else seeing this kind of jump? I am wondering whether it is a New Forest thing (we do get a lot of storm damage claims in the wider area) or whether this is just the state of the market generally. The house is brick and tile, no flat roof sections, no history of subsidence. Feels like being penalised for other people’s geography 
Same here, mine went up about 18% with Direct Line. Rang them, said I’d found cheaper, and they knocked £40 off without even asking who the cheaper quote was with. Worth a phone call before you switch. The whole thing feels like a loyalty tax dressed up as actuarial science 
@halfpenny_doris, good to know that works with Direct Line too. I tried the same tack with Aviva yesterday afternoon, mentioned I had been looking elsewhere, and the best they could do was knock it back to a 14% increase rather than 22%. Still feels steep for a property that has not changed and a customer who has been with them for nine years. I ran it through Compare the Market afterwards and the cheapest equivalent cover came in at £287, which would actually be about £60 less than Aviva’s “reduced” price. The catch is the cheaper one is with an insurer I have never heard of, Homeprotect, and I am slightly wary of going with an unknown name just to save a few quid. Has anyone here used them or is it one of those outfits that is fine until you actually need to claim?
PS. The allotment shed is not covered under any of them, I checked. Apparently it counts as a separate outbuilding. Marvellous.
Hello, I hope you do not mind a landlord adding a data point to this. We renewed our buildings and landlord liability insurance on the buy to let in Kent last month and it went up by about 27%, which was a real shock as we have never had a claim in the eighteen years we have owned the property. The broker said it was partly driven by subsidence risk being repriced across the south east after last summer, and partly just a general market hardening. We are with a specialist landlord insurer called Just Landlords, and to be fair they have always been easy to deal with, but the premium is now nearly £500 for a fairly modest three bedroom house.
I did look at switching but the quotes for landlord insurance were all within about £30 of each other so there was not much in it. I think the residential market may be slightly more competitive.
Many thanks for starting this thread, it is useful to know we are not the only ones seeing these increases.
@greenwhistle_hants, never heard of Homeprotect but I had a bad experience with a cheap insurer years ago, can’t even remember the name now. Claim took eleven months and they tried to argue the fence was pre-existing damage. Ended up with the ombudsman. Saved about £50 on the premium and lost about £50 worth of sanity. I’d stick with a name you recognise, personally.
Quick update on this. Ended up switching to LV= in the end, which came in at £387 for buildings and contents combined. That is about £140 less than Aviva’s renewal quote and roughly the same cover, though I had to add accidental damage back as an extra. The quote came through their website directly rather than via a comparison site, which was slightly cheaper than the same policy on Compare the Market for some reason I cannot fathom.
I did try Homeprotect as I mentioned upthread but they wanted £450 and the excess was higher, so that was a non-starter. @halfpenny_doris, your point about cheap insurers is well taken. I had a colleague who went with one of the very budget ones and they argued the toss over subsidence cover for about eight months. LV= seem to have a reasonable claims reputation from what I have read, but I suppose you never really know until you need them.
PS. The allotment shed is not covered. I checked.