UK Home insurance with a poor credit history

A County Court Judgment is often simply referred to as a CCJ and is a court’s judgement, having assessed all the details of the situation, as to whether or not a debt is due.

A CCJ will unfortunately have a severe negative impact upon things such as your credit score and your ability to obtain credit in the future. It is one of a few serious types of adverse credit history (the others being things such as bankruptcies and IVAs). This basically means that any future lenders will be able to see that you were unable to repay your debts and may fear lending you money encase they too have to pursue court proceedings in order to recoup their costs.

The first step for a lender to take to obtain a Ccj is to issue a Notice of Default. If you choose to ignore this (or the lender isn’t happy with the response you’ve provided), they can then ask for a County Court Summons to be issued for you to attend court.

Whether or not you subsequently pay off the debt, this CCJ will remain on your credit report for the next 6 years. The only exception to this is if you pay off the outstanding amount within one calendar month of the date of the County Court Judgement. However, even if you do this a strict protocol and procedure needs to be followed in order for the removal of the order to be approved.

The one way to avoid a hearing or a judgement and subsequent damage to your record, is to pay the outstanding amount in full as soon as you receive the County Court Summons. Obviously this will be dependent on you being able to access sufficient funds to repay this amount. If you do not do this, there’ll be a simple, private court hearing held, which you can choose to attend or just send the information the court asks for in the post.

How does this impact home insurance?

Having a CCJ on your financial record can be a barrier to a person getting as good a deal as others on their home buildings & contents insurance. This is mainly due to the person being seen as a higher risk by the insurer underwriters.

The impacts therefore can be:

• Increased premiums
• Reduced payment terms flexibility
• Increased terms applied to the policy
• Extra checks before submission
• More questions to answer
• Reduced choice of insurer

Insurance companies are now, as a result, classing a growing number of people with CCJs as a non-standard risk. However, there are companies who can offer better flexibility and terms for those with CCJs. Specialist home insurance providers such as CoverBuilder, can continue to offer excellent cover with competitive premiums to those with poor credit, CCJs, IVAs, and Bankruptcy.

CoverBuilder is a non-standard home insurance provider in the UK.