Damp and dreary May leads to rapid rise in roofing issues

The unusually wet and windy May has led to a surge in claims for roofing repairs, according to CET.

With some areas of the country, such as Wales, hitting record-breaking levels of rainfall for May before the month even ended, and the UK as a whole suffering one of the wettest Mays on record, CET had to act quickly to manage a 451 per cent growth in demand for roofing repairs compared to the previous month (April 2021).

According to the data team at CET, which specialises in home emergency policies handling claims for one in eight properties in the UK, requests from homeowners to fix roofing issues were also up 435 per cent on May 2020.

The team saw the largest spike on Saturday 8 May – which saw persistent heavy rain across the UK. Compared to the previous five Saturdays, CET saw a 20-fold increase on the average number of callouts for roofing problems.

The challenging weather conditions and increased customer requests did not cause any issues for CET, as 85 per cent of reported problems that required an engineer were fixed on the first visit. This was thanks to the team of ‘weather watchers’ at CET, who prepare for particularly adverse weather conditions by re-arranging shift patterns to ensure that claims handlers are available when there is an expected surge in requests from homeowners.

CET’s chief executive officer, Chris McLain, said: “By having a dedicated team of analysts monitoring potential triggers for surge activity – in this case, wet weather – we are able to plan ahead and ensure we have resources available to manage a rapid growth in customer demand.”

“Coupled with this is our investment in technology over recent years, such as our cloud-based claims management platform SIMPLIFi, and our ever-evolving AI means we can track progress of the issue in real-time and take account for extreme external events – such as the washout weather we have all dealt with this month.”