Insurance Scheme

The structure of your home is covered by Borough of Poole's own buildings insurance, against damage by things such as fire or flood. Your personal belongings are not insured by the council or Poole Housing Partnership (PHP) and it is up to you to insure these.

Although we hope nothing ever happens to your home, unfortunately we all know of someone who has suffered as a result of something like a burglary, fire or flood. Even if it doesn't happen to your property, it could happen to a property near you, and still affect your home and its contents.

If this happens you will need to claim from your own insurance or from another person's insurance. You cannot always prevent something happening but you can make sure that if it does, you have insurance to cover the cost of making good the damage.

There are many insurance companies who cover for events like the ones mentioned above, and many allow you to pay the premium in instalments over twelve months. You can find a list of insurance companies in the Yellow Pages or a local telephone directory.

Following feedback from residents we have worked hard to ensure a low cost and good quality home insurance scheme endorsed by the National Federation of Housing available for PHP residents. You do not have to take out this scheme and may prefer a scheme of your own choice but we strongly recommend that you do insure your possessions.

Claims against Poole Housing Partnership

You may make insurance claims against the Council or Poole Housing Partnership for any damage that the Council or Poole Housing Partnership causes to your possessions, or injury to you or members of your family providing that Poole Housing Partnership have been negligent.

However, there are a variety of other issues for which we may not be negligent. For example, if there is a particularly bad storm which lifts a tile off a roof and as a result water comes through the roof, through the ceiling and damages a bedroom carpet, we would claim that we had not been negligent as it could not have prevented that from happening. Under such circumstances we would seek to reject any such claim. If a contractor were to hammer a nail into the wall and inadvertently burst a pipe which resulted in the floor being flooded and ruining the tenant's carpet, the contractor would be responsible for the cost of replacing the carpet as clearly its action has been negligent.

If you are unsure about whether or not you could make a claim against the Council/PHP please contact us, see the contact details on the right of this page.