Only 32 per cent of storm claims resulted in a payment. The FCA noticed.
The FCA reviewed 2.5 million home claims and found that of 118,890 storm claims in 2024, under a third were paid. Rising severity and falling acceptance in the same market attracts attention.
In July 2025 the Financial Conduct Authority published a review of claims handling arrangements at 15 home insurers and 8 travel insurers, covering over 2.5 million home claims and over 1.5 million travel claims made between 2022 and 2024, with more than £9 billion paid out across both books.
One figure carried the report. Of 118,890 storm claims made in 2024 across the firms reviewed, only 32 per cent resulted in a settlement payment. Forty nine per cent were rejected. Nineteen per cent of customers simply stopped pursuing their claim.
Five firms had storm acceptance rates below 30 per cent. Five had customer walkaway rates above 25 per cent.
Why this is now a conduct issue rather than a claims issue
The Consumer Duty has applied to open products since 31 July 2023 and to closed products since 31 July 2024. Principle 12 requires firms to act to deliver good outcomes for retail customers, supported by three cross cutting rules: act in good faith, avoid causing foreseeable harm, and enable and support customers to pursue their financial objectives.
Underneath that, ICOBS 8.1.1R has long required insurers to handle claims promptly and fairly, provide reasonable guidance and progress information, not unreasonably reject a claim, and settle promptly once terms are agreed.
The July 2025 review found unnecessarily long claims handling times, ineffective management of customer expectations particularly around timescales, and over a quarter of firms with high uphold rates on service related complaints, some above 70 per cent. Five insurers had limited control over their outsourced arrangements. Four had no criteria for deciding when a cash settlement was appropriate.
In February 2026 the FCA made consumer understanding, claims handling and service quality its first stated insurance priority, and said it would broaden its review of how firms oversee outsourced and delegated authority claims arrangements, including remuneration.
The direction of travel is not helping. Acceptance rates for buildings only home policies fell from 68 per cent in 2022 to 63 per cent in 2023 and stayed there in 2024. The 2025 value measures data published on 21 July 2026 shows home claims acceptance between 62 and 71 per cent against 83 to 86 per cent for travel, with average payouts for buildings and contents up 17 per cent. The FCA flags that it believes there are inconsistencies in how firms report home claims acceptance, which is its own kind of finding.
The rulebook sets the outcome. The Ombudsman sets the evidence bar in practice.
This is the point most commonly misunderstood. ICOBS 8.1.1R prohibits unreasonable rejection, but no FCA rule prescribes the evidence you need to decline a specific claim. The FCA sets an outcome standard, not an evidence checklist.
In practice the working bar comes from how the Financial Ombudsman Service weighs a file, and FOS decides what is fair and reasonable having regard to the FCA rules. To rely on a policy condition, an insurer needs to show it is more likely than not that the condition was breached. Where fraud is alleged, FOS applies the civil standard but expects evidence cogent enough to match the seriousness of the allegation. A file of concerns and discrepancies, without more, has repeatedly proved insufficient in published decisions.
The Insurance Act 2015 sets the statutory backdrop. Section 3, the duty of fair presentation, applies to non consumer contracts only. Section 12, the remedies for fraudulent claims, applies to consumer and commercial policies alike. For consumer pre contract disclosure, the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 applies instead.
Then add the fraud problem. In figures published in November 2025, the ABI identified £1.16 billion of fraudulent general insurance claims in 2024 across more than 98,400 claims, including 18,700 property claims worth £189 million, up 11 per cent by volume.
So the industry is holding two positions at once. It must decline more confidently where fraud is real, and decline less often where the evidence does not support it. Both point at the same weakness: the quality of the record taken at the property.
What property claims cost now
£6.1 billion paid, the highest annual total on record, including £1.2 billion of weather related claims, up 14 per cent on 2024.
Up 15 per cent to around £6,000. Subsidence payouts reached £307 million.
Up 60 per cent to £30,000, on ABI figures published in February 2026.
Rising severity and falling acceptance rates in the same market attracts regulatory attention, and it has.
Where spatial capture changes the position
A surveyor visit currently produces a written report, a set of photographs and a memory. Six months later, when a claim is disputed and a complaint escalates, that is what the file has to carry.
A 3D capture, meaning a photorealistic three dimensional reconstruction of the property you can navigate and measure after the fact, changes the file. It is dated. It is measurable. It can be revisited by an underwriter, a claims manager, a fraud investigator or an Ombudsman without a second visit. Capture the same property before and after an event and the comparison is direct rather than argued.
For fraud, the value is in the chain rather than the image. Establishing what the property looked like at a fixed point in time, with provenance, beats an adjuster's recollection of a photograph.
For fair outcomes it works in the customer's favour just as often. A decline supported by a navigable record is defensible. A decline supported by four photographs and a paragraph is a complaint waiting to be upheld.
Ground capture and air capture are not the same regulatory problem
Commercial drone survey flights are regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority under assimilated Regulation (EU) 2019/947 and the Air Navigation Order 2016.
A surveyor flying in the Specific category close to buildings needs an Operator ID and a Flyer ID, a General VLOS Certificate, and a PDRA01 operational authorisation, which requires flights to stay within 500 metres of the remote pilot and no closer than 50 metres to uninvolved persons, reduced to 30 metres for take off and landing. Lower risk flights can sit in the Open category, which needs no operational authorisation but carries tighter weight and proximity limits. The Unmanned Aircraft (Amendment) Regulations 2025 took effect in stages from 1 January 2026, lowering the Flyer ID threshold from 250g to 100g and setting operator registration at 100g or more where the aircraft carries a camera.
Ground based capture avoids that authorisation chain entirely. For a claims operation running hundreds of property surveys a year, that is a material difference in cost and in how quickly a surveyor can be sent.
Honest limit: a capture is evidence of what a property looked like on the day it was walked. It does not price the risk, decide the claim or replace a loss adjuster's judgement. It gives whoever makes that judgement something better than a memory to make it on.
If your claims acceptance rates are moving in the wrong direction and you cannot fully explain why, the evidence at the front of the process is the place to look. We have written separately on what a photoreal record proves that a photograph cannot and on dated comparison as fraud evidence.
This article is general information about UK regulation and is not legal, regulatory or compliance advice. Firms should take their own advice on their obligations.
See what a claims survey record looks like
We can walk you through a dated, measurable capture of a property and how it is revisited later by an underwriter, a claims handler or an investigator without a second visit.
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