Now that I’m no longer on Her Majesty’s Service, I can let you in on a few secrets.

Ok, not in a James Bond ‘exploding teapot’ kind of way.

(and to be fair it is more than a quarter of a century since I was sent out to do Her valuable work).

The secret is that I used to work for the Valuation Office (the VO as we called it), which is an agency of Inland Revenue in the UK. My role was as a bright and bushy-tailed young Valuation Technician.

In order to calculate your correct level of property taxes, the Valuation Office provides a valuation to other agencies such as IRD and Local councils. You could disagree with the value band your property was in if you thought you were being taxed at too high a rate, and lots of people did, especially after major rating and policy changes.

The Valuation Office would send out a man with a clipboard (me), to look at the property and then look at records of comparable properties to see if you were in the correct valuation band.

If I met with the property owner on site and we could agree on the valuation, they would sign a form, and we were done.

If no agreement could be reached, the case would be automatically referred to an independent valuation tribunal, and each side would present it’s evidence.

The interesting thing is I never lost a case at Tribunal. NOT A SINGLE ONE, and I had probably hundreds of Tribunal Appellants listed during my time with the VO.

So this isn’t a Skite, but I think it is interesting to look at why that outcome was almost certain.

What on earth has this got to do with insurance? Well, I note some interesting parallels in how people react to difficult or seemingly unfair outcomes in insurance, and I hope that by applying some of this thinking to your insurance dealings, you’ll get a better result.

So what was it that you think I did to get this clean result? You might think that perhaps I bent the rules with onsite agreements for expedience, by letting Homeowners agree to a more advantageous valuation? Actually, I didn’t do that. Here is what I did use as the cornerstones of my approach:

TIP ONE – EVIDENCE

Firstly, I realised pretty early on that I held all the cards. The Valuation Office was provided a copy of the record of every single property sale in the UK – the type of property, the date of sale, the amount, and every other relevant physical detail.

The Appellants (or Homeowners) did not have this evidence. They could hire surveyors who did have access to large property databases, but most people couldn’t afford that, and Surveyors were very uncomfortable going up against Her Madge, especially at the top end of the market (I bet she would have been ruthless in Lucha Libre against other members of British aristocracy, some of whom I met in the role). Mostly the other side were making emotional arguments about what they thought was fair, and didn’t understand the rules of engagement. They would complain about me, the Inland Revenue, the housing market, the valuation date, tenants, the government, and even the weather to explain why they were in the wrong tax bracket and Life was generally unfair..

The government also has the power to compel people to provide additional evidence if it isn’t satisfied with the information provided.

Insurance Parallel:  Focus on actual evidence not emotions. All legal proceedings operate on evidence – make sure yours is watertight. In insurance claims this means record everything – emails, conversations, recordings, receipts,  written and verbal agreements. Document everything you can. If you can’t document it, you have no evidence. Writing down an emotional opinion doesn’t count as evidence. Your insurer wants to pay your claim – you just need to demonstrate how your evidence matches the policy wording (which your commercial broker is there to help you with 😉)

TIP TWO – ADVERSARIAL TONE

In my approach to the Homeowners, I favoured compromise and pragmatism, and avoided digging in my heels just to prove a point or get even, or wield some petty bureaucratic power (although I’m sorry to tell you I observed a small number of VO staff that seemed to do just that).

There is no need to get angry, and everyone is human – tribunal staff, IRD staff, insurance business staff, insurance assessors, and every homeowner I ever met. We are all open to giving our best when treated well. Treat people well, they will cut you more slack.

Having been through that mill, the thing that stuck with me was that the absolute nicest people to deal with were:  those that already  ‘had it all’ and carried that with a sense of responsibility and duty to others, and also there were those who had nothing except warmth and respect. I was invited to afternoon tea by owners of large estates and men who lived in vans in a paddock – they were mostly delightful. The social climbers were the worst – they often treated me like vermin and thought they were superior to everyone they met.

Insurance Parallel: Better behaviour will probably put more money in your pocket on claims (and isn’t that really what you want at the end of the day from insurance?).

TIP THREE – HONESTY AND DECENCY

Many people I dealt with attempted to hide the truth. I remember people that tried to hide separate residential units on their properties by hiding the entrance doors behind cupboards and taking bathroom fittings out temporarily for my visit. I can’t believe that was cheaper than paying a little bit more property tax. The minute this kind of thing is communicated at tribunal the Appellants fairly automatically lost.

Insurance Parallel:  In insurance devious behaviour can result in your financial downfall. Making fake declarations however minor for claims (also known as insurance fraud), can start a very dangerous chain of events. In any kind of business integrity is its own reward (and of course the reverse is also true).

If you got this far, thanks for sticking with my ramblings, you probably are my ‘tribe’, and I hope it helps you.