Buildings insurance - what is covered

Buildings insurance covers the fabric of your home (the bricks and mortar, windows, roof and other integral parts) as well as fixtures and fittings (such as kitchen units and central heating boilers). Here, ‘house’ generally means either house or flat. Buildings insurance is not a maintenance contract: it is intended to provide cover for specific damage or loss as a result of specific occurrences, not to pay for your running repairs. A condition of buildings insurance is that you keep your property in a good state of repair and take reasonable steps to prevent damage to it.
Buildings insurance will cover you against damage caused to your home (but not your possessions) by:

· Fire and smoke (but not smoke damage on its own)
· Lighting
· Explosion
· Earthquakes (these do happen in the UK but you will need proof that there has been a tremor strong enough to cause damage to your property)
· Storms of flooding (but not if the damage is to a hedge or fence)
· Subsidence, heave or landslip (though you usually have to pay the first £1,000 of any claim)
· Any sort of vehicle or animal crashing into your home
· Aircraft or things falling from them
· Falling trees, lampposts, telegraph poles or parts of them, breaking and collapsing of satellite dishes, television and radio aerials (but not damage to the dishes and aerials themselves)
· Theft or attempted theft (the cover is for repairing the damage, as a result of a forced entry for example, not for replacing any items stolen, which is covered by contents insurance)
· Riot (for which there is an exact meaning in law and a time limit of seven days for making a claim)
· Vandals and what the insurance industry calls ‘malicious persons’
· Water overflowing or escaping from water tanks and pipes
· Leaking oil escaping from heating systems