Zurich launches new scheme for social housing residents

For various reasons, access to home contents insurance has always been difficult for residents in social housing. This was brought sharply into focus last summer when the floods caused heavy uninsured losses to the very sectors of society least able to cope financially with their predicament.

After consultations with MP's, housing associations and local authorities, insurance company Zurich Municipal has introduced a new scheme for residents of social housing in an attempt to widen access to the insurance market. This comes as part of Zurich Municipal’s support for the Government’s initiatives for social inclusion as detailed in the recent report “Financial inclusion: an action plan for 2008-11”.

Tenants are often unaware that insuring their contents is their own responsibility and not that of their landlord. Even those who do realise what they should be doing are often fazed by the whole process of taking out insurance, in particular the prospect of calculating the value of their possessions, and so chose to do nothing. Under Zurich’s scheme, the premium is calculated according to the number of bedrooms in the property.

Many tenants do not have bank accounts and may be unable to finance a yearly or monthly payment and so Zurich have arranged for weekly payments in cash to be accepted. For those without access to the internet, policies can be taken out over the telephone.

With the UK facing so many freak weather conditions, it is alarming to know that over a million private renters have no contents insurance, despite the fact that a third of them estimate the value of their contents to be over ten thousand pounds.

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