U.K. Ruling’s Impacton U.S. Insurance Cases: Little to None

The U.K. High Court last week issued a ruling involving business-interruption claims against policies issued by eight insurers. Jason Schupp of the Centers for Better Insurance says the ruling is a “mixed bag” for U.K. insurers and policyholders and has little relevance for their U.S. counterparts.

In the U.K. case, Schupp writes, “the fundamental theme running through the insurers’ defense was that the policies only covered localized outbreaks, not global pandemics.”

“More to the point for U.S. property/casualty insurers,” says Michael Menapace, a professor of insurance law at Quinnipiac University School of Law and a Triple-I non-resident scholar, the U.K. case involved disease coverage – “an affirmative coverage not included in most U.S. commercial property policies.”

 U.S. business interruption disputes so far have turned on two key policy features:

U.S. business-interruption coverage almost always requires property damage to trigger a payout. Nearly all U.S. COVID-19-related court cases have involved policies that specifically exclude viruses.

“The U.K. court did not address either the question of property damage or the applicability of a virus exclusion,” Schupp writes.

As Menapace put it in a recent blog post about U.S. business-interruption cases, “Policy language controls whether COVID-19 interruptions are covered…. The threshold issue [for U.S. insurers] will be whether the insureds can prove their business losses are caused by ‘physical damage to property’.”