Duty of Fair Presentation

Section 3(1) of the Insurance Act 2015 provides that before a contract of insurance is entered into, the insured must make to the insurer a fair presentation of the risk. Under s.3(3), a fair presentation is one which makes the required disclosure, does so in a manner which would be reasonably clear and accessible to a prudent insurer, and in which every material representation of fact is substantially correct and every representation of expectation or belief is made in good faith. The required disclosure, per s.3(4), is either disclosure of every material circumstance the insured knows or ought to know, or, failing that, disclosure sufficient to put a prudent insurer on notice that it needs to make further enquiries to reveal those circumstances.

The duty replaced the old common law duty of utmost good faith for contracts within its scope and shifted emphasis toward a structured, accessible presentation rather than a mere data-dump of documents. Section 3(5) limits what must be disclosed in the absence of enquiry: an insured need not volunteer a circumstance that diminishes the risk, that the insurer already knows, ought to know, is presumed to know, or has waived. Breach of the duty engages the remedies in Schedule 1 of the Act, which are graded by whether the breach was deliberate/reckless or otherwise and by what the insurer would have done had a fair presentation been made.