Legal News

Sovereign Network Homes—formerly Network Homes Ltd, and Network Build Ltd According to a High Court order dated 26 March 2025, Sovereign Network Homes—formerly Network Homes Ltd—and Network Build Ltd reached confidential settlement terms with a consortium of nine insurers. Network Homes, the owner of the building, and Network New Build, the arm that entered building contracts for the association, issued proceedings in 2023, asserting a right to indemnity for losses arising from defects at a Watford development. The claimants said WPHV Ltd, also known as Willmott Dixon Housing Ltd, acted as main contractor on the scheme and was responsible for defective, combustible insulation and cladding. The contractor entered administration in December 2020 and held professional indemnity insurance with Chubb European between 2019 and 2020. WPHV also had excess insurance cover with......

The Fire Safety Reinsurance Facility Set up in 2024 in the wake of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in west London, the Fire Safety Reinsurance Facility has enabled cover for high‑risk buildings with fire safety issues that might otherwise have gone uninsured, the Association of British Insurers ( ABI) reported on 20 March 2025... The ABI noted that the facility, introduced by Mc Gill and Partners Ltd on 1 April 2024, is designed to expand insurers’ capacity to insure these properties by letting them distribute and share the related risks... The Grenfell Tower blaze, a high‑rise block of flats, resulted in 72 fatalities... Steve Mc Gill, founder and chief executive of Mc Gill and Partners, said it is ‘incredibly rewarding’ to see advantages emerging for leaseholders who have struggled to obtain insurance because of fire risks. ‘ I’m immensely......

MS Amlin says a new facility, created with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development ( EBRD) and insurer Aon Plc, is intended to ‘revitalise’ Ukraine’s war‑risk insurance sector. It enables local insurers to provide protection for inland cargo and transport to small and medium-sized enterprises. According to MS Amlin, €80m has been pledged for reinsurance, rising to €110m by 2030, to support policies issued by three Ukrainian insurers— INGO, Colonnade and UNIQA. The facility is supported by the EBRD, which, MS Amlin noted, allows the exposure to be transferred off its balance sheet under the new arrangement......

Insurance & Reinsurance weekly highlights—20 March 2025 In this issue: Cases and decisions Types of insurance Jurisdiction and applicable law Intermediaries and market practice UK regulation International regulation Cases tracker Dates for your diary New and updated content Daily and weekly news alerts Lex Talk®Insurance: a Lexis®Nexis community Cases and decisions Warranties, representations and the Insurance Act 2015 ( Lonham Group Ltd v Scotbeef Ltd & another) A decade on from the Insurance Act 2015 ( IA 2015) taking effect, the Court of Appeal has issued a notable judgment, considering for the first time how warranties and representations should be characterised under the ‘new’ legislation. The ruling offers clear guidance on the operation of IA 2015 and underscores that, although the Act aimed to rebalance the rights of insurers and policyholders, insurers can still avoid cover where a policyholder breaches a warranty. By Chris Neilson, partner, Leah Alpren- Waterman, of counsel, and Katie Henderson, trainee solicitor, at Mischon de Reya LLP. See...

Which? stated on 18 March 2025 it had polled 52 car insurers and 46 home insurers in February 2025 about the annual percentage rate on insurance finance, and discovered figures on a par with those levied by very expensive credit card companies indeed. The FCA opened a probe in October 2024 into premium finance, where policyholders spread the cost of yearly cover monthly rather than paying a single lump sum. Under this setup, insurers may often impose eye-wateringly steep interest charges on repayments......

HM Treasury has tasked the Law Commission with looking at the regulations for friendly societies and potentially overhauling them. Friendly societies are mutual providers of pensions or insurance, collectively owned by their members. Leading examples include: Royal London Shepherds Friendly Their operations sit within a patchwork of legislation, parts of which still date from 1974. On 12 March 2025, the Law Commission opened a consultation, running until June, to examine how the legal framework could be reshaped. According to the Commission, the present rules for friendly societies are fragmented, out of date and in need of modernisation......

Liberty Mutual Insurance Europe Se and other companies v Bath Racecourse Company Ltd (and 21 other Claimants listed in Appendix 1 to the Particulars of Claim) and other cases [2025] EWCA Civ 153 What are the practical implications of this case? Composite policies are often adopted as an efficient way to cover multiple insured parties, especially members of corporate groups, within a single policy instrument. The Court of Appeal’s reasoning that such a policy operates as a bundle of distinct insurance contracts between the insurer and each insured, together with its ruling here that each insured enjoyed a separate limit of indemnity, signals that limits in composite wordings will usually be treated as attaching to each individual contract, unless the language expressly provides that the limit is aggregated across all insureds under the composite arrangement. The court’s finding that insureds had to give credit for...

The High Court dismissed Howden’s contention that the matter should be determined in Brazil, where the claim accuses the broker of deploying Aon’s own staff as in-house recruiters to lure personnel from its Brazilian arm. Master John Dagnall found the bulk of the alleged misconduct is rooted in England, as Aon says London-based Howden leaders orchestrated matters as ‘puppet masters’ to prompt the raiding of its workforce. He added that the supposed actions of Howden’s UK operation serve as an ‘anchor’, keeping the entirety of the claims within this court’s reach. He stayed proceedings against Antonio Rodrigues, the then chief executive of Aon’s Brazilian reinsurance unit, whom Aon identified as the catalyst for 11 of its staff moving to Howden. The judge observed there is ‘no real commercial need’ for Aon to pursue Rodrigues, although, should it choose, it could bring action in...

Hastings Insurance Services Ltd v HM Revenue and Customs Specialists at MHA, in a note issued on 12 March 2025, warned that the fallout from the Tax Tribunal’s decision in Hastings Insurance Services Ltd v HM Revenue and Customs, handed down on 3 March 2025, may trigger a surge of claims. The dispute focused on whether the UK-based intermediary, Hastings, can recover £16m of value added tax repayments spanning four years from the government. The broker said the total tax at stake for the wider sector could be between £250m and £400m. ' It is clearly a significant amount', Robin Prince, VAT partner at MHA, said......

In a decision published on 12 March 2025, the regulator said it had directed Emma Allchurch to pay £4,229, having found that, when seeking a renewal quote in July 2019, she failed to give her insurer complete details of the work she was carrying out or the advice she had provided on property developments and investments......

Lonham Group Ltd v Scotbeef Ltd & another [2025] EWCA Civ 203 Traditionally, English insurance law placed onerous burdens on insured parties: they were required to reveal every material circumstance capable of affecting the judgment of a prudent insurer when setting the premium or determining whether to accept the risk. If they did not, the insurer could treat the policy as though it never existed. Likewise, any failure to comply with a warranty discharged the insurer from liability under the policy, regardless of the warranty’s relevance to the risk and irrespective of whether the breach was later remedied. In the early development of insurance, these severe rules were arguably justified by the informational imbalance between insured and insurer. By the twenty-first century, however, a more sophisticated market generated pressure for reform. For non-consumer insurance, the result was IA 2015, which marked a substantial change in...

In this issue: Coronavirus ( COVID-19) business interruption insurance Cases and decisions Types of insurance UK regulation Cases tracker Dates for your diary New and updated content Lex Talk®Insurance: a Lexis®Nexis community Coronavirus ( COVID-19) business interruption insurance The proprietor of a chain of boutique hotels contends that Howden Insurance Brokers Ltd should pay more than £20.4m for allegedly failing to secure adequate insurance, which left the group short when the coronavirus ( COVID-19) pandemic hit and compelled sites to close. See: Howden sued for £20m over hotel chains COVID-19 losses Cases and decisions Dormer (a protected party, by his mother and litigation friend Iteen Dormer) v Wilson and others This was a liability-only ruling in a serious personal injury claim arising from a road traffic accident with a stolen motorbike. It examined overlapping legal issues: the illegality defence in tort; an...

In a letter dated 10 March 2025, the Financial Conduct Authority ( FCA) and the Information Commissioner’s Office said they also plan to convene industry leaders to explore obstacles stopping financial services firms from adopting AI. According to FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi and Information Commissioner Jon Edwards, a recent FCA and Bank of England survey revealed that companies and trade associations harbour worries about embracing these fast-changing technologies. They noted with interest that respondents identified data protection and the consumer duty as among the top three regulatory barriers to rolling out AI across the sector, based on the survey responses cited by Rathi and Edwards. ‘ These findings appear to demonstrate a......

Firmdale Holdings Ltd, together with five subsidiaries operating the group’s hotels, alleged in High Court claim dated 5 February 2025 that its broker failed to secure insurance that would have entitled it to business interruption indemnity when government‑mandated closures were imposed across Britain. The claimant group (also including a hotel laundry and cleaning business, another Firmdale subsidiary) contends that Howden was negligent and must pay out to meet losses hotel owner maintains it would have recovered from an insurer. Had Howden performed with reasonable skill and care, the hotel businesses argue, their COVID‑19‑related interruption losses would have been insured, subject to applicable limit of indemnity, and insurers would have indemnified the claimants for those losses. Accordingly, Howden should pay out to cover losses they contend would have been paid by insurers in any event......

On 5 March 2025, the Court of Appeal set aside a High Court ruling that had required insurer Lonham Group Ltd to indemnify meat producer Scotbeef Ltd under a policy written for the now-defunct D& S Storage Ltd. Lord Justice Peter Fraser concluded the judge below had wrongly treated policy clauses concerning trading conditions as representations rather than warranties, and relied on incorrect provisions of the Insurance Act 2015. The appellate court determined D& S Storage breached those warranties by employing different trade terms in a contract, meaning Lonham 'has no liability to indemnify' the storage firm for losses pursued by Scotbeef. The dispute between Scotbeef and the insurer originates in a dispute between the producer and D& S Storage. The Scottish business reported that six pallets of meat it received from D& S Storage in 2019 were affected by mould. Scotbeef then said it...

The FCA’s call for certainty followed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, whose Mansion House address in November 2024 and accompanying letters pressed financial regulators to recalibrate risk aversion with economic growth. Her push gained broad backing from financial firms wrestling with the entrenched demands of the FCA’s Consumer Duty regime introduced 16 months prior right across the market already. Nikhil Rathi, the FCA’s chief executive, pressed ministers to spell out their tolerance for consumer harm in a speech on 27 February 2025, restating a request he had set out in a publicised letter dated 16 January 2025. Rathi has already scrapped the need for firms to appoint a board champion under Consumer Duty, which mandates good outcomes for consumers. Firms in the sector still argue that the sheer volume and intricacy of FCA guidance suppresses innovation and overburdens compliance teams. The FCA now seeks...

In this issue: Cases and decisions Types of insurance Market practice UK regulation EU regulation Cases tracker 2025 case tracker Dates for your diary New and updated content Daily and weekly news alerts Lex Talk®Insurance: a Lexis®Nexis community Cases and decisions Lonham Group Ltd v Scotbeef Ltd and another company This appeal was about the interpretation of a contract of insurance and the possible application of the Insurance Act 2015, including its remedies for breaches of the duty of fair presentation. Lonham succeeded on appeal. See: [2025] EWCA Civ 203. Types of insurance Environmental liability On 27 February 2025, the European insurance company Swiss Re stated that it expects losses of under US$700m arising from the mass wildfires that swept the Los Angeles ( LA) area in January 2025. See: Swiss Re expects less than US$700m hit from LA...

Athena Asset 5 SÁRL Athena Asset 5 SÁRL has reached a confidential settlement with the FTSE 100 housebuilder and BDL Group Ltd, as recorded in a High Court order dated 8 February 2025 that has recently been disclosed to the public. The deal concludes a claim concerning a catalogue of allegedly serious defects uncovered after the Grenfell Tower fire in west London in 2017, which claimed 72 lives. The settlement brings the proceedings to a close. Athena, part of the group operating as i Q Student Accommodation, stated in an October 2022 filing that it should be repaid for the works required to remedy issues at the student accommodation in Acton, west London. Berkeley and BDL were said to have failed to comply with fire safety standards during construction. High-rise apartment buildings across the UK have since become the centre of a safety crisis,...

On 3 March 2025, Moody’s Ratings characterised the new mandatory obligation as “credit positive” for insurers, even though it introduces further balance sheet vulnerabilities arising from exposure to floods and other types of natural catastrophes. Effective 31 March 2025, the legislation covers every firm operating in Italy, and it also extends to foreign enterprises that maintain a local branch. An exemption exists for fishing and associated sectors, granting them until year-end 2025 to obtain the policy. According to unverified Italian media reports, in 2024 only 6% of households carry natural catastrophe insurance and 5%......

International Entertainment Holdings Ltd and others v Allianz Insurance plc [2024] EWCA Civ 1281 What are the practical implications of this case? The Court of Appeal’s analysis preserves several avenues for policyholders to advance arguments in forthcoming coronavirus-related disputes. The judges observed that the wording in issue was a ‘pick and mix’ assemblage, being a patchwork of clauses borrowed from other contracts, with no effort to maintain consistent drafting across the policy. On that basis, they considered that any assumption of uniform usage carried little or no weight, and that similar phrasing elsewhere in the document might offer limited assistance when construing the disputed term. Accordingly, a policyholder with a more cohesive, integrated policy (unlike the wording in IEH) could point to other provisions to sustain a broader interpretation of ‘policing authority’ and thereby obtain indemnity for their loss. The Court of Appeal...