Topic: the Insurance Act 2015 fair-presentation duty and claims-handling impact for SME commercial buyers. Spokesperson: Matt Bartlett, Director, Apex Insurance Brokers Limited.
This briefing covers the Insurance Act 2015, the fair-presentation duty it introduced, and how that duty actually works in SME commercial placement and claims handling in 2026. The Act came into force on 12 August 2016 and applies to non-consumer insurance and reinsurance contracts entered into on or after that date. A decade after it came into force, the Act is still misunderstood by SME buyers and unevenly handled by parts of the broker market. The briefing is plain-English and broker-side.
The legal commentary on the Act sits with law firms — Apex does not give legal opinion. The insurance-market angle, the broker view of the duty in practice, and the SME buyer’s perspective is what Apex is credentialled to comment on.
The Insurance Act 2015 replaced the old utmost good faith / non-disclosure regime with a duty of fair presentation. The duty requires the insured to disclose every material circumstance the insured knows or ought to know — or, failing that, to give the insurer enough information to put the insurer on notice that further enquiry is required. The remedies for breach are proportionate — they range from a price adjustment to avoidance, depending on the type of breach and what the insurer would have done if the breach had not occurred.
The plain-English summary Apex uses with clients: tell the insurer everything you reasonably know about the risk, in a way the insurer can find and read; if you do not know something but it is a fair question, say you do not know rather than answer in a way that implies you do; and remember that the duty sits with you, the insured, not with the broker.
For SME buyers, the practical effect in 2026 is that the proposal form is the principal disclosure vehicle, that the duty is real and enforceable, and that the broker’s job is to make sure the disclosure made through the proposal form (and the supporting documents) is fair and complete enough to survive a claims challenge.
“The Insurance Act 2015 is not new law any more. It is the law. But ten years in, SME buyers still under-disclose and brokers still under-prompt.”
“The duty of fair presentation is the insured’s duty. The broker’s job is to help the insured discharge it. Both sides forget that at their peril.”
“A clean proposal form in 2026 is the best protection an SME buyer has against a claims dispute. That is what the Insurance Act 2015 is for.”
“The remedies under the 2015 Act are proportionate. That is the underrated change — the move away from binary avoidance and towards a graduated remedy is the change that makes the Act fair.”
“The most common fair-presentation failure Apex sees in SME placement is the buyer answering ‘no’ to a question they don’t fully understand. The right answer when in doubt is ‘tell us more’.”
“Brokers who run a structured proposal-form refresh at each renewal are managing the fair-presentation risk for their clients. Brokers who don’t are leaving the duty unsupported.”
“For SME buyers, the practical effect of the Act is that disclosure is now an active discipline, not a passive form-filling exercise.”
The Insurance Act 2015 came into force on 12 August 2016 and applies to non-consumer insurance and reinsurance contracts entered into on or after that date.
The duty of fair presentation, the proportionate remedies regime, the rules on warranties and the basis-of-contract clauses ban are the four principal elements of the Act relevant to commercial placement.
Apex publishes plain-English client briefings on the fair-presentation duty, available on the firm’s website.
Apex runs a structured proposal-form refresh at each renewal across its commercial book, anchored in the fair-presentation duty and in the firm’s proposal-form library.
The principal trade body resource on the Act for SME brokers is BIBA’s published guidance, which is updated periodically as case law develops.
Apex does not give legal opinion on the Act or on specific case law. Legal opinion sits with insurance and commercial law firms.
Apex will not comment on a specific case under the Act without the relevant parties’ permission.
Apex will not predict the outcome of pending fair-presentation case law.
Apex will not name a specific insurer in critical terms on fair-presentation handling without the insurer’s right of reply.
Because the duty of fair presentation is harder to satisfy than it looks, and because the proposal form is still the principal place where the duty is discharged. SME buyers in 2026 still treat the proposal form as a list of questions to answer rather than as a structured disclosure of the risk. The Act puts the duty on the insured, not on the broker, but the broker’s job is to make sure the disclosure is fair and complete. That is structurally harder than the old utmost-good-faith regime made it look — the duty now requires positive presentation, not just absence of misrepresentation.
The buyer answering “no” to a question they do not fully understand. That is the single most common failure in SME placement. The buyer reads a question — typically a question on past circumstances, historic claims, related-party risks or risk-management practices — and ticks “no” because they are not sure or because the question feels narrow. If the right answer is “we do not have a clean read on this” or “tell us more about what you mean”, the buyer needs to give that answer rather than tick “no” by default.
The second most common failure is incomplete disclosure of historic notifications. Brokers often see proposal forms come back with the previous year’s notification answer carried forward — but a notification made in the previous year and dealt with quietly is still a material circumstance that should be disclosed at the next renewal.
The third is mis-disclosure of related-party or group-risk circumstances. SME firms working in a group or in a related-party structure sometimes treat the disclosure question as restricted to the named entity on the policy, when in practice the underwriter is reading the question more broadly.
Proportionate. If the breach is reckless or deliberate, the insurer can avoid the contract and keep the premium. If the breach is not reckless or deliberate, the remedy depends on what the insurer would have done had the breach not occurred. If the insurer would not have entered into the contract, the insurer can avoid the contract and return the premium. If the insurer would have entered into the contract on different terms, those terms can be substituted. If the insurer would have charged a higher premium, the claim can be reduced proportionately. The graduated remedies regime is the part of the Act that moves the law away from the binary avoid-or-not regime that pre-dated it.
In practice, the fair-presentation duty becomes live when a claim is notified. The insurer is entitled to test the disclosure that was made at placement against what the insurer would have done if a fair presentation had been made. Most claims do not engage the duty — most claims are paid on the standard policy terms and the fair-presentation question does not arise. But where a claim is on the borderline, or where there is a circumstance at the time of placement that has now become a claim, the duty is the first place the insurer’s claims team looks.
For an SME claim, that means the work the broker did at placement determines how the claim runs. A clean, full, well-structured proposal form earns the client the standard claims handling. A thin, partial or evasive proposal form puts the client at risk of a proportionate remedy.
The Apex version, briefly: at each renewal, the broker takes the prior year’s proposal form, reads it against the current state of the client’s business, surfaces every change since the last renewal (turnover, sector mix, client base, named individuals, fee mix, historic notifications, claims, risk-management practices), and rewrites the proposal form rather than carrying it forward. The refresh includes a dedicated conversation with the client on what has changed, a re-read of every question that is sensitive to fair presentation, and a sense-check of the disclosure tone — is the disclosure actively presenting the risk, or is it passively answering questions?
That work takes more time at the broker end. It is the work that distinguishes a broker who is managing the fair-presentation duty for the client from a broker who is taking the renewal for granted.
Less than they used to be. The Act changed the law on warranties materially. A breach of warranty no longer automatically and irreversibly discharges the insurer from liability. The breach now suspends cover while the breach is continuing, and cover resumes when the breach is remedied. The Act also banned basis-of-contract clauses — the clauses that previously turned every statement on the proposal form into a warranty.
That is good news for buyers. But warranty wording in SME commercial policies still needs to be read carefully — the suspension regime can still bite where a breach occurs at the moment of loss, and basis-of-contract clauses still appear in some old wordings even though they are now void.
The duty is the insured’s. The broker’s role is to support the insured in discharging it — by running a structured proposal-form refresh, by surfacing the questions where the insured is uncertain, by drafting the disclosure narrative that accompanies the proposal form, and by reading the wording the cover is bound on. The broker who treats the proposal form as a tick-box is failing the client; the broker who treats it as a working disclosure document is doing the job the Act assumes.
Yes — but Apex does not give legal opinion. There has been a developing body of fair-presentation case law since 2017. Journalists writing on the Act should speak to insurance law firms (Clyde & Co, Kennedys, DAC Beachcroft, Mills & Reeve and others publish regular updates on the case law). Apex will speak to what the broker is seeing in placement practice — the case law texture is for the law firms.
Plain-English client briefings on the fair-presentation duty, the proposal-form refresh process, the warranties regime under the Act, and the claims-handling implications. The proposal-form library on the website includes question-by-question commentary on the live commercial and PI proposal forms, with the fair-presentation lens applied.
The best Insurance Act 2015 pieces give the practical SME buyer’s view alongside the legal commentary. A piece that quotes only law firms reads as legal trade press; a piece that quotes a broker on what the duty looks like in placement practice reads as insurance trade press.
The best pieces name the proposal form as the central disclosure vehicle and explain why. Pieces that talk about the duty in the abstract miss the operational reality of how the duty is discharged.
The best pieces are clear that the duty is the insured’s, not the broker’s, while honestly addressing the role the broker plays in supporting the insured to discharge it. That nuance is often lost in shorter pieces.
For media enquiries: Matt Bartlett, Director — matthew.bartlett@apexinsurancebrokers.co.uk — 0117 325 0027. Apex Insurance Brokers Limited, FCA FRN 724952, Companies House 07014570. Trading address: QCS, 53 Queen Charlotte Street, Bristol BS1 4HQ.
Last reviewed: June 2026.
Apex Insurance Brokers serves UK professional services firms and commercial businesses. Call 0117 325 0027, email hello@apexinsurancebrokers.co.uk, or request a quotation.
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