Fire Safety Insurance Claim Denial: How Missing Records Defeat the Claim

After a hospitality fire, the loss adjuster's first request is paperwork. The fire risk assessment, the extraction cleaning records, the alarm service log, the thermostat service certificate. Whether the insurer pays often turns on what the operator can produce in the days that follow, and on how the policy reads against what the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires.

The adjuster's records list

The request list tracks closely with the maintenance regimes a typical hospitality policy ties to cover. The written fire risk assessment. Fire alarm service records under BS 5839-1. Extinguisher servicing certificates. Extraction duct cleaning reports on a TR19 schedule. Fryer thermostat service records. Staff fire training records. The fire logbook showing weekly and monthly checks.

Each item appears somewhere in the maintenance and risk-control sections of a typical hospitality policy. RSA's Pubs, Restaurants and Hotels wording sets out the connection between records and cover in unusually direct terms: "Where material to the loss, failure to comply with any of these requirements will result in Us not paying Your Property Damage claim." Within the policy the records function as contractual conditions; under the Fire Safety Order they sit as evidence of compliance with broader duties.

The Order requires a written assessment, recorded management arrangements under Article 11, and maintenance of fire safety systems, without prescribing retention periods or formats for cleaning certificates, alarm service logs, or thermostat records. The insurer's wording fills that detail.

FOS decisions in the file

The Financial Ombudsman Service has tested several hospitality fire declines against this kind of policy condition. Three published decisions illustrate the spread.

In DRN-5463547, AXIS declined a fast-food restaurant claim after a fire above a fryer. The policy warranted that extraction hoods, canopies, filters and grease traps would be cleaned at least monthly, and ducts including motors and fans every six months. The operator could not produce contractor invoices or name the cleaner. The ombudsman did not uphold the complaint: the absence of records meant the warranty had not been shown to be met.

In DRN-3277211, AXA declined a takeaway claim after a deep fat fryer fire. The policy condition required cooking equipment to be attended at all times during operation. CCTV showed the employee outside the fire exit on the phone for around eleven minutes before the fire took hold. The ombudsman agreed AXA was entitled to decline the claim and ordered a written apology only for the way the decision was communicated.

In DRN-4896364, Aviva declined a claim after an arson fire two weeks after a partial gable-wall collapse. Aviva relied on alarm-decommissioning, the unoccupied-premises seven-day inspection condition, fair-presentation breach and a gradual-deterioration exclusion. The complaint was not upheld.

How the Insurance Act 2015 reshaped the remedy

Before August 2016, this arithmetic was harsher. An insurer could void a policy entirely for any warranty breach, even one unconnected to the loss. A lapsed electrical certificate could sink a flood claim. The Insurance Act 2015 changed the mechanics in two ways.

Section 10 provides that breach of a warranty suspends the insurer's liability during the period of breach rather than terminating cover. Once the breach is remedied, cover resumes.

Section 11 provides that the insurer cannot rely on non-compliance with a term to defeat a claim if compliance with that term would not have reduced the risk of the loss that actually occurred. A lapsed extinguisher service does not defeat a theft claim under Section 11.

The Section 11 protection turns on the relevance of the breach to the loss. A breach of an extraction-cleaning warranty is directly relevant to a fryer fire, and the insurer is not prevented by Section 11 from declining the claim on that basis.

How the courts read the warranty

BlueBon Ltd v Ageas (UK) Ltd [2017] EWHC 3301 (Comm) is the closest High Court parallel on warranty compliance in a hospitality fire. A hotel was destroyed. The policy warranted that electrical installations would be inspected and certified. The warranty had not been satisfied, and Ageas avoided the claim. The fire pre-dated the Insurance Act 2015, so the pre-Act position on warranty breach applied.

The case predates the proportionate remedy structure in Sections 10 and 11. Under that current structure, the insurer's position depends on whether the breached term is relevant to the loss. Where it is, the published FOS files above show how that test plays out at first-instance dispute resolution.

What this leaves operators with

The fire authority and the insurer look at the same records for different purposes. The fire authority's reading sits within the enforcement ladder under the Fire Safety Order, which calls for steps that are "reasonably practicable." The insurer's reading sits within the policy conditions and warranties, which call for the records and frequencies named in the wording. Gaps that a fire officer might raise informally can register as warranty or condition breaches at claim stage.

That difference is why operators who have passed fire safety inspections can still see claims declined. The written fire risk assessment that became mandatory under Section 156 is one of the records adjusters routinely ask for. Where a pub changes hands, the records travel with the building under Article 22A, and a fire safety prosecution and a contested insurance claim run on separate tracks against different legal tests.