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This is a publication about business insurance, written from claims that actually happened.

It does not sell or arrange insurance, run quote forms, or recommend an insurer or broker. Each claim story is drawn from a court judgment, an FOS decision, an ABI case study or named trade press, cited and dated.

Browse the Claims Story Library Read the Legal Notice and FCA position

What this site is, and where it stops

What this site publishes

This site explains how business insurance works by starting with what actually went wrong: a flooded restaurant, an accountant who notified a claim late, a builder without employers' liability cover. Each story is drawn from a court judgment, a Financial Ombudsman Service decision, an ABI case study or named trade press, and each carries a link to that source and the date it was decided or published. The claims story library and the guides work to the same discipline: the case comes first, the rule that decided it second, and what a business should do about it third.

What it does not do is give advice on a reader's own policy, quotation or claim. It does not produce a quote, does not compare named insurers or brokers, and does not rank one provider against another. Where a reader's question is really "should I do this", the answer here ends at a named destination such as the FCA register, the Financial Ombudsman Service, BIBA or the ABI.

How a claim story reaches this page

A story starts with a public record: a court judgment on BAILII, a published FOS decision, an ABI case study, or a piece of named trade press coverage that a reader can check by following the link. The sequence of events, the clause the case turned on and the sum in dispute come from that record.

  • Find a source that is public and linkable: a judgment, an ombudsman decision, an ABI case study, or named trade press.
  • Read the wording the dispute actually turned on, whether that is a warranty, an average clause or a notification condition.
  • Set out what happened first, then the rule the court or ombudsman applied, then what it means for a business reading it.
  • Cite the source with a link and a date, so the reader can check it independently.

Reading a judgment is a different exercise from reading the press coverage of it, and the two do not always agree on emphasis. Where they differ, the source cited here is the judgment or decision itself.

Not FCA-authorised, and not selling anything

This site is a publication, not a broker or an insurer, and no regulated insurance distribution activity happens here: no quote form, no eligibility checker feeding into an application, and no referral arrangement with any insurer or broker, now or later. That is a deliberate line, because writing about how claims are decided is a different activity from arranging the cover in the first place, and the two should not be blurred for a reader trying to tell them apart.

The distinction matters for what you can reasonably expect from a page here. If you want a quotation, that conversation happens with a broker or insurer directly, and BIBA's find-a-broker service is one way to locate one. If you want to check whether a firm is authorised to sell you cover, that is what the FCA register is for. If you have a complaint about how an insurer handled a claim, the first step is the insurer's own complaints process, and the Financial Ombudsman Service is the destination after that, for businesses that meet its eligibility criteria. None of that happens on this site, and the legal notice sets out the position in full.

Sourcing and verification

How a claim story gets from the public record to the page

A claim story here starts with a decision that was actually made, by a court or an ombudsman. This is the path a story takes before it appears, and the point at which it stops if that path breaks down.

  1. Finding a judgment, decision or report worth explaining

    Claim stories come from court judgments, Financial Ombudsman Service decisions, ABI case studies and named trade press coverage. A story is chosen because the underlying decision turned on a policy word, a disclosure, or an exclusion that readers keep running into.

  2. Confirming the source can be checked independently

    Before anything is written, the source has to be public and linkable: a judgment on BAILII, a decision published by the Financial Ombudsman Service, a dated ABI case study, or a named trade press article a reader could go and re-read.

    Source is public and linkable

    The story moves to drafting, with the source link kept for publication alongside it.

    Source cannot be verified or re-fetched

    The story does not run. No claim story on this site is composited, anonymised into fiction, or written from a secondhand summary.

  3. Reading what happened and what was decided

    This step establishes the sequence: what was insured, what happened, what the insurer said, and what the court or ombudsman found. Where a claim was refused on grounds touching fraud, the piece states only what was decided, not any characterisation of intent beyond the judgment itself.

  4. Identifying the rule the case turned on

    Each story exists to explain a mechanism, whether that is a duty of fair presentation, a condition precedent, or how average applies to underinsurance. This step ties the outcome to the statute, the policy wording, or the legal principle that produced it.

  5. Writing the story in claim-first order

    The published piece opens with what happened, not with background or a definition. The rule is explained second, using the case itself as the illustration, and what it means for a reader's own cover comes last, without straying into telling them what to do about it.

  6. Publishing with the citation attached

    Each story carries a link to its source and the date it was checked, so a reader can open the original judgment or decision.

    Dates matter because thresholds, statutes and case outcomes can all be superseded later, so a figure or a finding is only current as of the date shown against it.

Finished stories built this way are collected in the claims story library, and the statutes and cases they cite can be checked directly on BAILII, the FOS decisions database, or legislation.gov.uk.

Why this site is not FCA-authorised

Business Insurance Quotation is a publication about business insurance. It carries no FCA authorisation, and it does not arrange, recommend or facilitate the purchase of any insurance policy. That is a deliberate position, and it shapes everything else on the site.

What FCA authorisation is for

Arranging, advising on or dealing in insurance contracts is a regulated activity under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. A business carrying out that activity needs authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority, and its status can be checked on the FCA Register. Authorisation exists so that a customer buying cover has someone accountable if the sale goes wrong: a broker who owes a duty of care, an insurer bound by its own regulatory rules.

What follows from not holding it

This site has no quote forms, no referral links to insurers or brokers, and no mechanism that routes a reader toward buying a policy through it. It does not compare named insurers, does not rank brokers, and does not tell a reader which cover suits their business. Where a reader's question is really about their own circumstances, the honest answer points to a named destination: the FCA Register to check a firm's status, the Legal Notice and FCA Position page for the fuller statement of what this site is and is not, or BIBA's find-a-broker service to locate an authorised adviser.

Why that matters for what you read here

A site that sells insurance has a reason to present one outcome as better than another. This one does not, because it has nothing to sell. That is a structural fact: the claim stories, the guides and the tools exist to show how cover actually behaves when tested, cited to a public source in each case, and the reader is left to take that understanding to a conversation with an authorised broker or insurer. How to Get the Right Quote for the Right Cover sets out what that conversation should cover once you get there.