An insurer must not:

clear questions
The insurer must first provide evidence that it asked the customer a clear question when the customer asked to take out or renew a policy. The insurer may ask questions via a traditional proposal form, which records the answers.

In many cases the transaction will have taken place over the telephone. If there is no evidence, such as a call recording and/or a copy of the statement of facts that the insurer has sent the customer, then we will have to decide what is likely to have happened. If the customer gives a credible account of events, we may find it more likely than the insurer’s version.

A similar statement of fact would be required for internet sales; as would some evidence of the questions asked during the website process, as it existed at the time of the application.

inducement
Legally, the insurer must establish that the non-disclosure or misrepresentation ‘induced’ (or influenced) its decision to enter into the contract. This was established in Pan Atlantic Insurance Co Ltd v Pine Top Insurance Co Ltd (Reported [1994] in Volume 3 of the Weekly Law Reports at page 677).

If the insurer cannot prove inducement then the policy will remain valid, even if the non-disclosure was deliberate. The burden of proving inducement will not be high in clear-cut cases. For example, if a customer fails to disclose that their house has serious cracks, we are likely to believe the insurer would not have offered them full buildings insurance.

the customer’s state of mind
Not all instances of non-disclosure or misrepresentation breach the duty of ‘utmost good faith’. We have identified four types of non-disclosure (deliberate, reckless, innocent, and inadvertent) to help us decide whether, with regard to all the available evidence, the customer acted in breach.

It is possible to deliberately non-disclose without being fraudulent. While dishonesty is one of the essential criteria for fraud, there must also be deception, designed to obtain something to which you are not entitled. For example, a customer might deliberately withhold information they are embarrassed about. Although, in doing so, they are acting dishonestly and deliberately, they are not acting fraudulently because there is no deceitful intention to obtain an advantage.

Only where there is clear evidence of fraud should the insurer retain the premium. In all other cases of deliberate or reckless non-disclosure, the premium should be returned, not least so as to protect the insurer’s position. Retaining the premium could be interpreted as an intention to affirm the contract and/or waive the right to ‘avoid’. Our experience is that most insurers return the premium in any event.

deliberate
Customers deliberately mislead the insurer if they dishonestly provide information they know to be untrue or incomplete. If the dishonesty is intended to deceive the insurer into giving them an advantage to which they are not entitled, then this is also a fraud and – strictly speaking – the insurance premium does not have to be returned.

reckless
Customers also breach their duty of good faith if they mislead the insurer by recklessly giving answers without caring whether those answers are true or false. An example of recklessness might be where a customer signs a blank proposal form and leaves it to be filled out by someone else. The customer has signed a declaration that ‘the above answers are true to the best of my knowledge and belief’, but does not know what those answers will be.

innocent
Customers act in good faith if their non-disclosure is made innocently. This may happen because the question is unclear or ambiguous, or because the relevant information is not something that they should reasonably know. In these cases, the insurer will not be able to ‘avoid’ the contract and (subject to the policy terms and conditions) should pay the claim in full.

inadvertent
A customer may also have acted in good faith if their non-disclosure is made inadvertently. These are the most difficult cases to determine and involve distinguishing between behaviour that is merely careless and that which amounts to recklessness. Both are forms of negligence.

Inadvertence occurs when the customer unintentionally misleads the insurer. This can occur just by failing to read and check the questions and answers thoroughly enough. When this happens there is no breach of the duty of utmost good faith.

For example, a policy application may contain a clear question about motoring convictions and penalty points. The customer discloses a careless-driving conviction but fails to disclose that they have three penalty points for speeding. In that situation, we might believe that the customer genuinely overlooked his conviction. The customer clearly did not intend to mislead the insurer because he disclosed the more serious offence; he simply failed to realise that penalty points were also part of the question. So the insurer should act as it would have done if it had been in possession of the full facts.

Where there has been inadvertent non-disclosure or misrepresentation, we expect insurers to rewrite the insurance. This should be done on the terms they would originally have offered if they had been aware of all the information. In some cases this may result in a proportionate payment; in others it may result in no payment at all. This is because the inadvertently-withheld information would, if disclosed, have led to the firm declining the application altogether.