A Carlisle roofing company says roof damage is the category where homeowners are most likely to discover the money is not coming.
The reason is a word most people never encounter until a loss adjuster uses it. Causation. Buildings insurance pays for sudden accidental damage; it has never covered deterioration, and no standard UK policy ever will. So when slates come off in a gale, the question the insurer asks is not how bad the weather was. It is whether the weather broke something, or found something already broken.
“That distinction decides the claim, and almost nobody knows it exists until they are on the wrong side of it,” said David of Roof Repairs Carlisle. “We get called to roofs where the nails rusted through years ago. The slates were sitting there by weight and friction and not much else. One decent gust and half a course is in the garden, and from the adjuster’s point of view the storm exposed a maintenance problem rather than caused one. The claim gets refused, and the homeowner is genuinely baffled, because there was a storm and there is a hole.”
What tips a claim one way or the other, the company says, is rarely the photographs of the damage. It is whether anyone can describe the mechanism.
“A report saying ‘roof damaged in high winds‘ is close to worthless,” David said. “What an adjuster wants is ‘wind uplift at the verge has lifted the end slates and fractured the mortar bedding’. That sentence explains how the storm did it. The first one just says something happened. We have seen claims turn around on nothing more than a roofer going up and writing the second version instead of the first.”
Cumbria has more at stake here than most counties. Carlisle sits at the end of an open run in from the Atlantic with the Solway funnelling weather inland, and Met Office 1991-2020 averages give the city 918.8mm of rain across 152.6 days a year. Frequency does more damage than volume. Roofs here get wet, dry out and get wet again several hundred times a winter, and fixings corrode on that cycle rather than in any single storm.
Which is why the firm is pushing homeowners to act now rather than in December.
“Everything that protects a claim has to exist before the damage does,” David said. “Dated photographs of the roof in good order. A record that somebody competent looked at it. Once the slates are in the garden, you are arguing from nothing. September is the month that decides how February goes.”
What a roof damage claim actually needs:
- Dated photographs of every elevation taken now, while the roof is intact. These are what establish the roof was sound beforehand.
- The date and, if possible, the time the damage happened. Insurers check this against Met Office records for the postcode.
- A written report describing the failure mechanism, not just the damage.
- An itemised quote rather than a single lump sum, so each element can be approved separately.
- Receipts for any emergency work done to prevent further damage. That cost is normally recoverable.
- Your policy’s own definition of a storm. Most set a wind speed threshold in the region of 55mph.
Roof Repairs Carlisle offers free roof inspections across Carlisle and Cumbria. Details are at www.roofrepairsincarlisle.co.uk/storm-damage-repairs.
