- Saga believes Nina is now high risk and wants to push her annual premiums up
Nina Stratford saw her annual home insurance quote rise over 500%
Nina Stratford was late to acting. It was only after a career as a health and beauty journalist and a bit of enjoyable amateur dramatics along the way that she decided at the age of 50 to take a postgraduate course in film, TV and radio at East 15 Acting School, University of Essex.
A career as a professional actor beckoned.
Now 68, she has no regrets. Nina has enjoyed some notable acting successes, starring as the President of the United States in Simon Cox’s 2019 film Invasion Planet Earth.
She is a regular fashion guest presenter on shopping channel QVC, is a voice-over artist and is about to launch into the world of TV presenting.
Nina admits that she is not quite in the same league as some female actors the same age as her – the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Imelda Staunton.
But it doesn’t bother her in the slightest. She makes a decent living from her work, plays tennis with friends and is content with her lot. She is not a homeowner, instead renting a one-bedroom flat in Buckinghamshire.
Yet it seems that her career is now counting against her when it comes to the home insurance she has had with Saga since October 2022.
Saga believes she is now high risk and wants to push her annual premiums through the proverbial roof.
Generally, actors tend to get a hard time from home insurers because they are perceived to be in the public eye and are often away performing.
As a result, their properties and contents can attract the eyes of criminals, leading to claims that insurers must then meet (after policyholders have paid the excess).
I’m all for banks doing their utmost to protect customers from scammers.
So while I welcome the new rules proposed by the Treasury, enabling banks to delay suspicious payments for 72 hours while they investigate whether they are fraudulent or not, it is vital they must not be exploited by the banking industry.
A few days ago, a dear friend told me about the difficulties she had trying to distribute the final proceeds from her late mother’s estate.
Although she understood why her bank, Santander, queried five-figure payments to the three other beneficiaries of the will, she got a bit rattled when it later challenged her on payments she was making to ensure that the cash she had inherited was wisely saved.
Despite being right to check the payments were legitimate, it had no right to then ask her why she was moving money to Nationwide (the simple answers: it offers better savings rates and it has a presence in the town she lives in (unlike Santander) while she has no wish to have money with any financial institution above the £85,000 safety net).
Shielding customers from fraud is in all our interests, banks as well as consumers).
But the banks shouldn’t be allowed to use the proposed 72-hour shield as an excuse to ask all customers who are making big (legitimate) withdrawals why they are moving it to a competitor.
It’s none of their business.
Two years ago, Saga was relaxed about her occupation as an actor and charged her just over £42 for contents cover.
A year later it increased in price to £66 – Nina paid up despite the 57 per cent premium hike.
Then, last month, just ahead of receiving her renewal premium, Nina was contacted by Saga’s underwriters.
They wanted to know what field of acting she was in (film, TV, theatre), if her property was left unoccupied for long stretches because of her work, whether she was high-profile and if she appeared on any news outlets.
Given Saga had known she was an actor all along, the questions threw her. But she answered them all: respectively, ‘in all three fields’, ‘potentially’, ‘I am not famous’ and ‘no’.
The answers seem to have unsettled the underwriters because a few days later she received her renewal premium.
For the same level of cover, Saga now wanted to charge her £434, a sky-high increase of 554 per cent.
To put this into perspective, comparison website Go Compare says average home insurance premiums are rising by 32 per cent a year.
‘I was outraged and frankly insulted,’ Nina told me last week.
‘I’m not a West End star. I’m just among the 98 per cent of actors who get by through complementing their work with alternative sources of income such as voice-overs and presenting.’
She rang Saga to complain. It in turn spoke to its underwriters which were not prepared to explain the 554 per cent increase.
Peeved, Nina has now found alternative cover at around the same price as she paid last year.
Over the past few months, many readers have complained about the steep premium increases that Saga (allegedly a friend of the over-50s) has tried to get them to pay when their policies renew.
Although few have been as large in percentage terms as Nina’s, they confirm that Saga (burdened with debts) is struggling to remain a competitive force in insurance (it offers car, travel and health cover as well as home insurance).
It was no surprise, therefore, to learn last week that it is in talks with European insurer Ageas about offloading parts of its insurance business.
The quicker it does this, the better – for the reputation of the Saga brand and those policyholders who have yet to follow Nina and jump ship.
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