Home Emergency Cover

Home Emergency cover can be added to your Bronze, Silver or Gold policy as an optional add-on. Bronze, Silver and Gold John Lewis Home Insurance is brought to you through our Home Insurance provider, Munich Re Digital Partners Ltd. For Specialist Home Insurance brought to you through Covéa Insurance plc, this comes as standard.

What is Home Emergency cover?

It’s the middle of the night and you wake to the sound of water dripping in the kitchen. You go downstairs to find out you've got a burst pipe and need some help straight away.

If there’s an emergency in your home, the last thing you'll want to worry about is trying to find a tradesperson you can trust to come and fix the problem. If you have Home Emergency cover with a John Lewis Home Insurance policy, all you need to do is call our 24-hour Home Emergency helpline and we’ll arrange for one of our specially selected tradespeople to come out to you.



During very busy times, like after a winter storm, it might take us a little longer, but we’ll always provide help as quickly as possible.

What does it cover?

Home Emergency cover deals with situations that, if not dealt with immediately, will make your home unsafe or insecure, cause damage to your home or its contents or result in your home losing its main source of heating, lighting or water.

Typical examples of home emergencies are:

• Heating failure if the primary source of heat for your home, for example your boiler breaks down. 

• Burst internal pipes or leaking radiators, if they're causing damage to your property.

• Electricity supply failure should your whole supply fail within the property.

• Blocked drains or sewage pipes belonging to your home, if they are causing damage to the property.

• Broken or damaged windows that mean the property isn’t secure.

• Rats, mice, squirrels or wasps' nests inside the property.

Home Emergency cover does not include everything which you may regard as an emergency. It does not cover normal day-to-day household maintenance or repairs that need to be carried out periodically, such as descaling water pipes or dealing with leaking taps.

While Home Emergency does not cover the boiler itself for Bronze, Silver or Gold policies, your boiler is covered if it's your primary heating system when experience a loss of heating or hot water because it fails or breaks down.

For our Specialist cover, we do not cover boilers over 15 years old, those beyond economic repair or boilers with an output of over 60kw (kilowatt) per hour.

What's included with Home Emergency cover?

• The reassurance that comes with access to our 24-hour emergency helpline, helping to give you the peace of mind that there’s always someone on the other end of the phone.

• Access to expert advice, as well as help with the cost of home emergency assistance.

• Our approved tradespeople, including plumbers and carpenters, are on hand to help you after an emergency.

How we pick our tradespeople

Our team of tradespeople are on hand to carry out urgent work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

They're specially selected by our provider, to offer you the best possible assistance. All of our selected tradespeople have the correct qualifications, including Gas Safe for all heating engineers. We also check recommendations from previous customers so you can rely on a trustworthy service.

Bronze, Silver and Gold Home Insurance: a special team of auditors are on hand to monitor contractors in the first months they are in the network.

Specialist Home Insurance: the networks are procured following a rigorous tender process. Performance is continuously monitored, including compliance with service level agreements, and annual audits. The VIP claims process includes proactive calls to customers and networks so as to drive claims to a swift and satisfactory conclusion.

If you find yourself in an emergency at home it’s important that you contact us first. We can assess what’s happened and get the right tradesperson out to help you.