Review finds big gap in awareness of natural hazards insurance
Friday, 25 October 2024
The yawning gulf between payouts for land damage and the cost of repair was a major insurance issue for Kiwis hit by the record 2023 floods, a Natural Hazards Commission review has found.
The proposed solution is not changing the payout rules, but a communications campaign to manage “inflated expectations”.
The independent review of the natural hazard insurer’s response to the Auckland Anniversary and Cyclone Gabrielle floods found just half (51%) of affected Kiwis were satisfied with their claims experience.
While flood victims appreciated the one-stop-shop approach introduced after the Kaikōura earthquake, where private insurers manage claims on behalf of NHC, they had “inflated expectations” of land damage payouts and found them complex and slow, the report found.
The problem is that the Natural Hazards Insurance Act only provides cover for the lesser of the value of the damaged land, or the cost to repair it. In the case of landslides on steep banks, the difference can be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“The amount of money is only a fraction of what it is going to cost to reinstate it,” one flood victim commented.
Wellingtonian Gill Parnham also found that out the hard way, after a 2022 slip took out her retaining wall. She was paid about $27,000 for land that cost $290,000 to stabilise.
“I’m still explaining my situation to people - they just think I’ve missed a trick … People still don’t get just how exposed they are if something bad happens.”
However, rather than examining whether the rules should change, NHC is running a Know Your Cover communications campaign, so Kiwis better understand the system.
NHC chief executive Tina Mitchell said it was not the commission’s job to decide policy settings.
New Zealand was the only country where insurance covered land, and expanding that would be costly, Mitchell said.
“It's a big societal question for our country and for most countries … insurance will never really fully put people back in exactly the place they were before a natural disaster.
“When it’s every single residential home in New Zealand, you do have to think about what's affordable.“
Kiwis needed to know that NHC land cover was only a contribution, so they could reduce their risk, or plan for the financial loss, Mitchell said.
Minister David Seymour had no plans to review land cover provisions, given the legislation was updated last year. However, he was pleased the commission was working to improve awareness of cover limits.
Mitchell would not grade the commission’s performance on a scale of 1 to 10, but was not happy with the 51% satisfaction rate. The agency would continue to streamline the claims process to make it quicker and easier.
Mitchell said having two major disasters so close together stretched resources.
“It really highlighted to me, not just for our organisation, but for our whole country, that we're having to adjust at speed to climate change being on our doorstep and behaving in surprising ways.”
Lisa and Paul Watson’s Cyclone Gabrielle-drowned Pākōwhai property did not have the problem of a gulf between land value and the cost to repair it. But they still faced an exhausting, 10-month fight for a fair insurance payout, including to get NHC reimbursement for work to clean up the silt-smothered land.
“We were broken as broken can be,” Lisa said. “Trying to just get through what we'd gone through, and then to have to be every single day waking up and fighting just for what was fair was just destroying.”
Next week the family moves into a new home, after renting for 19 months.
“We can finally start our lives again.”