ABSTRACT
Fraudulent claims is one of the areas in which the Insurance Act 2015 introduced a reform. However, the IA’s intervention in the special common law rules that apply to fraudulent claims is limited to codifying the remedy for making a fraudulent claim (including group insurance) and restricting the option of contracting out of the IA in this area to some limited circumstances. As a result, the current position is that whilst the remedy for making a fraudulent claim is codified by the IA sections 12 and 13, the rules determining whether a claim is fraudulent are found in the common law. Before the IA 2015, the remedy was a special common law rule1 which applied even when the policy was silent about it.2 This conclusion was derived from Britton v The Royal Insurance Co, where Willes J said that the rules applicable to fraudulent claims were ‘in accordance with legal principle and sound policy’.3
