Home Emergency Assist Review

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Home Emergency Assist sells home emergency cover from £3.38 a month for plumbing and drainage and £9.78 a month for its Complete plan, which pays up to £1,000 a claim and £3,000 a year. Its Supercharged plan is £12.23 a month and lifts that to £5,000 a claim with no annual ceiling. Prices and limits checked on 19 September 2026 against the company's own policy book and product information documents, all dated September 2026.

The firm is unusually open with its paperwork. It publishes a full policy book and five separate product information documents, each version-numbered and dated in the filename, and it names the underwriter in both — which is more than several of its rivals manage. The excess can be set at £0, a boiler service is bundled into the Complete plan, and the claims line runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Home Emergency Assist Limited is registered in England as company 08279496 and works out of the Arena Business Centre in Poole.

Two eligibility rules decide whether any of it is available to you. The cover is sold to homeowners living in the property as their main residence, so landlords, tenants, holiday homes and park homes are outside it; and no plan covers a boiler more than 15 years old, or one rated above 238,000 Btu net input (70 kilowatts). If either applies, the quote form will not help you.

£3.38 to £12.23: the four plans and where each one stops

The plans are sold as a ladder rather than a single product. Plumbing & Drainage is advertised at £3.38 a month and covers burst pipes, blocked external drains, the water supply pipe and blocked toilets. Boiler & Heating is £4.90 a month and takes in gas, oil and LPG boilers, complete loss of heating and complete loss of hot water, the gas supply pipe and up to £50 towards an alternative heat source. Complete, at £9.78 a month, adds electrics — defined as the complete failure of at least one circuit — plus up to £250 towards a hotel if the house is left uninhabitable, and folds in an annual boiler service. Supercharged sits above all of it at £12.23 a month.

What separates the top plan is not the list of covered events but the ceiling on them. The September 2026 policy book sets Essentials cover at £1,000 for any one claim and £3,000 across the policy year, applied section by section: boiler, central heating, plumbing and drainage, electrics and security each answer to the same pair of numbers. Supercharged raises the per-claim figure to £5,000 and removes the annual cap altogether. Overnight accommodation stays at £250 a claim on both.

Two older products are still described in the same book and will be on some certificates. Essentials 500 pays £500 a claim and £1,500 a year — a third of the current Essentials limit — and Essentials 5K pays £5,000 a claim but stops at six claims in a year. If you bought before this September, check which of the four sets of numbers is actually yours before assuming the £1,000 applies.

The boiler replacement contribution is a separate pot again: up to £500 towards a new boiler if yours is written off as beyond economic repair, and nothing at all in the first six months of the policy. Excess is a choice of £0, £60 or £95, and the compulsory £60 sits on top of whichever you pick for any call-out in the first 90 days, or on any boiler more than ten years old.

Two £35 fees that no monthly price shows

The About Our Services document, version 3 of September 2026, sets out what the premium does not include. A £35 arrangement fee is charged when the policy is set up or renewed. It is refunded only if you cancel inside the 14-day cooling-off period with no claim made or pending. Cancel after that and the arrangement fee is kept and a further £35 administration fee is charged — £70 in fees on a policy you may have held for a fortnight.

On the cheapest plan the fee is the larger part of the bill. Plumbing & Drainage at £3.38 a month is £40.56 over a year; add the arrangement fee and the first-year cost is £75.56, with the fee amounting to 86% of the premium itself. On Complete the arithmetic is gentler but still material: £117.36 of premium becomes £152.36. Nothing on the plan pages carries those numbers, and the monthly figures quoted in advertising are premium only.

The same document confirms the sale is non-advised — "We won't recommend a specific policy, but we'll give you all the information you need to make the right choice for you" — and that the firm takes commission which is "included within the insurance premium". A non-advised sale means nobody is assessing whether this cover suits your house, your boiler or the cover you already hold, and there is no suitability report to fall back on if it turns out not to.

Four insurers behind one brand, depending on which document you read

The name on the website is not the name that pays the claim, and it has changed more than once. The current policy book, coded 0926 v3, states that cover is underwritten by Novus Underwriting Ltd — itself an appointed representative of Rokstone Group Ltd, FCA reference 1008277 — acting on behalf of Collinson Insurance, the trading name of Astrenska Insurance Limited, FRN 202846. That arrangement is recent. Collinson announced on 1 August 2025 that Novus had granted it exclusive binding authority over a book of annually renewable warranty products running to more than 500,000 policies. Novus writes over £230 million of gross premium a year and has a five-year target of £550 million; its parent Rokstone underwrites around USD 1.1bn across specialty lines.

Documents still in circulation name two other insurers. The Essentials 5K product information document puts Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Ltd, FRN 202323, behind the £5,000 limit and its six-claim ceiling. The policy book issued in April 2025 names Financial & Legal Insurance Company Ltd, FRN 202915, with Legal Protection Group Ltd, FRN 749446, as administrator and a separate claims number on 0333 700 1040. Three insurers and two administrators across eighteen months of paperwork is a lot of movement for one product line, and it means the certificate you were sent is the only reliable guide to whose paper you are on.

Home Emergency Assist itself carries no FCA permission of its own. It is an appointed representative of Insure Group Limited, FRN 584710. The FCA's own description of that relationship is short and useful: "The principal agrees what activities the AR can do and is responsible for that business." So a complaint about the way the policy was sold is ultimately Insure Group's responsibility, even though the letterhead, the phone number and the brand all say something else.

The same cover is £1.83 a month cheaper through a staff-benefits portal

Home Emergency Assist runs partner pages for employee-benefit and affinity schemes, and the prices on them are not the prices on the main site. The Discounts for Carers page offers Complete at £7.95 a month against £9.78 on the public site, Boiler & Heating at £3.98 against £4.90, and Plumbing & Drainage at £2.75 against £3.38, using the code DFC35OFF for 35% off. On Complete that is £1.83 a month, or £21.96 a year — 18.7% less for the same plan name. The public site's own codes, SAVE20 on home emergency and SAVE10 on appliances, are worth less.

The partner terms are not identical either, which matters more than the money. That page offers excess options of £0 or £50 rather than £0, £60 or £95, and applies a £50 additional excess where the public site applies £60 — with the trigger stated as an appliance over six years old rather than a boiler over ten. It also carries the note "Prices correct as at 10.03.2025", so the figures on it are eighteen months older than the ones on the main site. Read whichever page you are buying from rather than assuming the plan names mean the same thing on both.

Neither the home page's claim of savings "up to £460 a year" nor the "up to 78%" figure beside it is supported by published workings. The terms and conditions page carries no basis for either, and no comparison methodology could be found on the site. Treat both as advertising until the company publishes the assumptions behind them.

Who actually turns up when the boiler goes out

Nobody employed by Home Emergency Assist will be at your door. The policy book says work is carried out by "one of our approved engineers", and the company's own FAQs describe "an extensive network of professionally qualified tradesmen" — a contracted network, arranged and paid by the claims operation. The network is not named, its size is not published, and the documents give no route to instruct your own plumber and claim the cost back afterwards. That could not be verified from any company source and is worth asking about on the phone.

Where gas is involved the law narrows the field regardless of who books the job. Under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 in Great Britain, and the equivalent 2004 regulations in Northern Ireland, anyone working on a gas appliance must be on the Gas Safe Register. That is a genuine floor under the quality of a boiler call-out, and it applies whether the engineer comes through this policy or you ring one yourself.

The performance figures the company does publish are specific enough to hold it to. It claims 75% of emergencies attended within four hours and 80% resolved on the first visit, 90% of calls answered within 20 seconds, and 70% of jobs booked while the caller is still on hold, with the average call under 15 minutes. None of it is audited or externally verified, but a firm that prints numbers in that shape is easier to argue with than one that says "rapid response".

One procedural rule catches people out. A claim must be reported within 48 hours of the problem starting; the claims page states that anything reported later "will not be accepted". A leak noticed on the Friday of a weekend away is a claim that needs making before you get home.

Ten years, fifteen years, and the service the sales pages call optional

The boiler is where this policy is most likely to disappoint, and the age rules are the first reason. Pass ten years and every claim carries an extra £60 compulsory excess on top of whatever voluntary excess you chose. Pass fifteen and the boiler is outside the policy altogether, as is anything above 238,000 Btu net input. Those are the ages at which a household most wants this cover, and they are the ages at which it costs more and then stops.

The servicing position is muddier than it should be. The current policy book describes a yearly boiler check as something "you can add as an optional extra to your policy, or you may choose to arrange it privately with your own contractor outside of your cover", and the FAQs say a service is not required, offering to add one for £90. Yet the same book's general exclusions rule out "general wear and tear, gradual deterioration, or lack of maintenance", and the April 2025 wording spelled the same clause out as "lack of maintenance or neglect by you, including where an annual boiler service has not been completed". The current book no longer names the annual service in that clause — that reading is ours, not a statement by the insurer — but a household that has skipped servicing for three years and is told its breakdown is wear and tear will find the argument lands in the same place. Keep the service receipts whether or not you buy the add-on.

The rest of the exclusion list is conventional and worth reading before you rely on the policy. Descaling and any work arising from hard-water scale is out. So is the replacement of water tanks, cylinders and radiators, and radiator valves other than as an emergency repair. Problems that existed before the policy started are excluded, as is anything caused by poor installation, faulty design or not following the manufacturer's instructions. Nothing at all is covered in the first 14 days, nothing under boiler replacement for six months, nothing while the home has stood empty for more than 60 consecutive days, and nothing in the first seven days after you move in or move back.

Three complaint desks, three addresses, and no independent rating

Where you complain depends on what went wrong, and the three routes do not share a phone number. Anything about the sale or the administration goes to Home Emergency Assist on 03330 034 999 or complaints@homeemergencyassist.com, addressed to the Complaints Department at the Arena Business Centre, Holyrood Close, Poole, Dorset BH17 7FJ, with an acknowledgement promised within three working days. Anything about how a home emergency claim was handled goes to a separate desk on 0330 094 8301, with five working days quoted on the online form; the policy book also routes some claims complaints to info@assuredresponse.co.uk, a name that appears nowhere on the sales pages. Appliance cover is different again — that one is handled by MB&G Insurance Services Ltd at the Cobalt Business Exchange in Newcastle upon Tyne, NE28 9NZ, on 0330 124 4531.

The backstop is standard. If the complaint is unresolved after eight weeks, or you disagree with the final response, the Financial Ombudsman Service will look at it free of charge on 0800 023 4567, and you have six months from the final response to refer it. The policy is covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

What is missing is any outside verdict on the product. No Defaqto or Fairer Finance rating for Home Emergency Assist could be found from a primary source, and Defaqto's public star-ratings pages do not list it. The company publishes no complaints volumes or uphold rates of its own, which larger sellers in this market now do, so there is no way to compare how often its claims decisions are challenged. On the evidence available, the documents are good and the track record is unreadable.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 19 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.