logo
Tesco £100k home insurance quote leaves couple baffled

Tesco £100k home insurance quote leaves couple baffled

BBC News17-03-2025

A couple were left reeling after getting a home insurance renewal quote of just under £100,000.Dr Peter Cunningham and his wife Patricia from Newry have insured their bungalow with Tesco for a number of years paying £580 for last year's premium.This year's quote for £99,999 left the couple baffled.Tesco insurance and money services told BBC News NI that "incorrect information" had been sent to Dr Cunningham, but said the company was "unable to renew" his home insurance cover.
When he received the renewal quote, Dr Cunningham said he thought the figure was a typo so called the Tesco helpline."The gentleman I spoke to in the customer call centre was able to confirm that I had been sent out a policy renewal. "I got another letter afterwards, sending me the policy documents. So if it was an error, it was an error times two."Patricia Cunningham said she saw the funny side: "I just laughed - I could not believe it."But she was also worried by what may have happened had the couple not paid attention to the routine letter."If we had been away on holiday and it had automatically renewed, I don't know what would happen," she said."It's absolutely, totally outrageous."
Tesco insurance and money services said the letter had been an isolated error and it was "really sorry"."The error was recognised almost immediately and an updated letter sent explaining that we were unfortunately unable to renew the customer's home insurance cover this year," the statement continued."Insurance providers regularly review underwriting criteria to make decisions based on a number of risk factors. "Unfortunately, this meant that Dr Cunningham was declined for a renewal quote this year."
'Let themselves down'
Dr Cunningham said he believed the refusal to provide insurance cover for the year ahead was because he made a claim after Storm Éowyn."First insurance claim we had in nine years, and it was a storm that nearly blew the whole island to a different position in the Atlantic. "So you could make the assumption that you're being penalised for making a claim."We had an electric surge which blew all the electrics in the house."Tesco Insurance were fantastic, dealt with it incredibly well. It was just over £3,000 and it was paid out very quickly."Tesco Insurance said the denial of a policy for this year was "not related to him having made a previous claim".It has left the couple "disappointed" in the company."They've let themselves down in my eyes in this situation and once trust is gone, trust is very difficult for them to rebuild up again," he added.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

JOHN MACLEOD: He's watching! My unsettling brush with Big Brother while buying sausage and onions in the local Tesco
JOHN MACLEOD: He's watching! My unsettling brush with Big Brother while buying sausage and onions in the local Tesco

Daily Mail​

time3 hours ago

  • Daily Mail​

JOHN MACLEOD: He's watching! My unsettling brush with Big Brother while buying sausage and onions in the local Tesco

The other day I noticed a mildly alarming development at our local Tesco. What had hitherto been a tiny, monochrome LED screen itemising each of my purchases, in cigarette-packet print, as the till-chick scanned everything through was suddenly as big as a copy of Cosmopolitan. In vivid Technicolor. With an image of every item and in very big print. I glanced right and left. It was the same at every other till. Each customer's shopping blaringly detailed for all to see. Today, mercifully, it was just sausages, onions, fresh thyme, and a bag of fresh chicken stock. But what if the screen had been regaling every adjacent passer-by with an itemised haul of, um, intimacies? It's bad enough when it's a bottle of Jamesons and some Williams Bros craft-ale. You can just imagine some onlooker's thought-bubble. 'Well, there goes Johnny Journo. Dylan Thomas: The Final Days.' But what of the day, decades hence, when my basket might include the products of deliverance from, as the commercials exquisitely put it, mild bladder weakness? As they say, every little helps. It is even worse at the self-checkouts. These I try to avoid. For one, I genuinely enjoy the brief social interaction with the lads and lasses manning real ones. For another, every different retail chain seems to use different machines and I can never remember on which side I may safely deposit my basket and on which as much as a fat carrot at once invokes the whine of 'Unauthorised item in the bagging area.' There is also an inordinately long list of items which cannot be sold to minors – stuff you probably would not think of: matches, kitchen-knives, bleach, glue and razorblades among them. So, again, the machine purses its digital lips, and there you are stuck till the harried attendant drifts over to confirm you are a verifiable old ruin, swipe his magic card and have a swift nosy at your messages. And worse – much worse – is to come. Across Britain, supermarkets are already rolling out artificial intelligence and autorecognition technology. In England and Wales, they can even hook up their facial-recognition cameras with police databases. VAR – the same technology that has already made football so farcical – is being deployed too. The selfsame tech that catches Erling Haaland's muscular behind offside now lurks, like a beast waiting to spring, lest you amble out of Asda with a can of sweetcorn you haven't paid for. Tesco, too, now trials such kit – though not, so far, in the Outer Hebrides. A wee bird's-eye camera will hang over each self-checkout, watching your every move. Should that Jolly Green Giant can not properly be scanned, it'll immediately play you a finger-wagging video – and, no doubt, in extremis, alert the hovering security-dude the size of a small house. Even a decade ago, most Brits would have balked at this sort of thing. In the Nineties, it would have been unthinkable. 'Some of this will make your life easier,' muses one observer. 'Some of it already does. But much of it asks for something in return: your data, your privacy, your patience, your trust. And not everything you're being asked to give is visible. 'This is not science fiction. It's not the future. It's your local Tesco.' Driving all this, of course, is the issue of what the trade calls 'shrinkage,' we call shoplifting and what our grannies called stealing. Annually, it costs British retailers billions. There were 516,971 offences recorded in 2024 – a signal leap from the 429,873 thefts logged the year before. But only one in five instances saw anybody charged: in more than half, no suspect could even be identified. Hence all this baleful new technology. The unsettling sense of being coldly studied by a machine. Watched, flagged, corrected and accused. That, actually, your caring sharing Co-op fundamentally distrusts you. Around 1990 that moral watchdog of the nation, the Free Church Presbytery of Lewis – unnerved by what had become a hedonistic and at times predatory Stornoway nightlife – called for closed-circuit television cameras to be dotted through the town. People stared, the tabloids tittered and the West Highland Free Press ran a very funny cartoon. No one could imagine anything as outlandish. Yet we have now had CCTV in the island capital for decades. From the Manor roundabout to outside An Lanntair, Big Brother is watching you. We are already well on the way to being one of the most surveilled societies in Europe. Even our most casual online browsing is eagerly monitored by all sorts of bots. When, fancying a new piece of kitchen kit, I casually Googled slow-cookers, for days on end thereafter adverts for said crockpots stalked me at every online turn. Retailers I had never heard of even sent me emails. Not everyone will tolerate this. The Germans will not stand for CCTV and, save where it is genuinely vital for public safety – like airports – you will see no cameras anywhere. That reflects not just dark folk-memory of the Nazis, but the decades much of the country then endured under a Communist dictatorship – a society so bleak, so grey and so stifling that, as President Kennedy cracked, 'We do not need to build a wall to keep our people in.' From secret policemen, regular informers and the occasional grass, it's reckoned that one in 6.5 East Germans worked for the Stasi. In Tirana, the Albanian capital, under the long night that was Enver Hoxha's Communist regime, the state could rely on one in three. Indeed, I am old enough to remember when much of rural Lewis, into the present century, felt like something very similar. People kept binoculars by their main window. Wizened crones knew every car and every numberplate. Murmured if you skipped church; found an excuse to drop by if you received a mysterious visitor or if Donny the Post had dropped off a strange parcel. Boys and girls courted, of necessity, in the hours of darkness: ministers did not dare step out of the manse, of a Saturday, lest there be talk of their casual disregard for sermon preparation. It sounds hilarious, but it was to some degree genuinely oppressive and why, for so many young islanders, getting on meant getting out. My mother still remembers an occasion in 1988 when, home on holiday, she joined my father, a senior clergyman, on a spin to the village where he had been born. He was casually dressed, they told no one where they were going, the latest family car had never been on the island before and they did not stop until they reached his uncle's croft. And they were not ten minutes in the house when the phone rang. It was a couple several townships away whom my father had signally helped when, months earlier, their son had died in tragic circumstances in Edinburgh. The Reverend Professor must now call on them, he must put up a word of prayer with them, and he must do it now. So much for that day of holiday. 'And you know what?' my mother still cackles darkly. 'After all that, they joined the Free Church Continuing.'

Pod Point fails to spark as EDF seals cut-price takeover
Pod Point fails to spark as EDF seals cut-price takeover

Sky News

time5 hours ago

  • Sky News

Pod Point fails to spark as EDF seals cut-price takeover

Pod Point's three-and-a-half year journey as a public company will near an ignominious end on Thursday when it recommends a cut-price takeover by EDF, the French state-backed utility. Sky News has learnt that Pod Point - which now trades just as Pod - is expected to issue a statement saying that its board has fallen in behind the 6.5p-a-share offer from EDF, which will value the company at only about £10m. The recommendation will end a calamitous run for Pod Point's stock, which has suffered amid shifts in electric vehicle take-up. It operates thousands of EV charging points across the country, including many located in Tesco store car parks. The company floated its shares at 225p in November 2021, valuing it at about £350m, meaning that investors who have remained on its share register since then are nursing huge losses. Erik Fairbairn, Pod Point's founder and then-chief executive, invested millions of pounds of his own money in its initial public offering. One leading Pod Point investor called the decision to recommend the offer "inevitable but disappointing" given that EDF already owns a 53% stake in the business. EDF acquired a majority stake in Pod Point in 2020, through a joint venture with Legal & General Capital. L&G's asset management arm, along with other major City institutions such as Schroders, remain significant shareholders in the company.

Cadbury fans ‘disgusted' as chocolate pack shrinks
Cadbury fans ‘disgusted' as chocolate pack shrinks

Western Telegraph

time6 hours ago

  • Western Telegraph

Cadbury fans ‘disgusted' as chocolate pack shrinks

The product in question is the Dairy Milk Little Bars multipacks which are now being sold as packs of four instead of packs of six. A pack of four chocolate bars costs £1.40 on Tesco's website despite a pack of six of the same chocolate bar costing the same price last month, reports The Sun. Cadbury fans 'disgusted' at chocolate bar 'shrinkflation' Taking to the review section on the Tesco website, one customer said: 'Advertised as new, only thing new is you get 4 instead of 6!! For the same price. Disgusting!' Another commented: 'Stop reducing how much is in the packet and charging the same price!!!' A third noticed the difference in pack size: 'Taken 2 bars out. STILL SAME PRICE. Were 6 now 4. Disgraceful.' Someone else shared: 'Was a six pack now a four pack for the same price, a third less chocolate, unacceptable shrinkflation'. The Sun explained that another pack of Cadbury chocolate bars – Freddos – had reduced from five bars to four as well as Cadbury Dairy Milk multipacks which went from nine bars to seven. Lib Dems call for customers to be told about 'shrinkflation' The Liberal Democrats want government legislation amended to legally require large supermarkets to inform shoppers when the quantity of goods within a pre-packaged product has decreased thereby increasing the price per unit of measurement. Discontinued UK sweets/chocolates Details of the changes would need to be attached or placed alongside the product for a 60-day period, according to the amendment tabled to the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill. Supermarkets would be forced to tell their customers if they want them to 'pay more for less' under the proposals designed to tackle 'shrinkflation'. Digestive biscuits, butter, crisps and chocolate bars were among the items found to have decreased in size while their unit cost increased, according to 2024 research by Compare the Market. Cadbury told The Sun: 'We understand the economic pressures that consumers continue to face and any changes to our product sizes is a last resort for our business. Recommended reading: 'However, as a food producer, we are continuing to experience significantly higher input costs across our supply chain, with ingredients such as cocoa and dairy, which are widely used in our products, costing far more than they have done previously. 'Meanwhile, other costs like energy and transport, also remain high. This means that our products continue to be much more expensive to make and while we have absorbed these costs where possible, we still face considerable challenges. 'As a result of this difficult environment, we have had to make the decision to slightly reduce the weight of our Cadbury Dairy Milk Little Bars multipacks so that we can continue to provide consumers with the brands they love, without compromising on the great taste and quality they expect.' Newsquest has approached Cadbury for comment.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store