Author: Faryal Bhatti, Marketing Manager, Norton Insurance Brokers
Key takeaways
Storm damage to fences and gates is excluded on almost every UK buildings policy, Defaqto found just 1% of policies cover it. Vehicle impact, vandalism, and fire usually are covered.
Solid garden walls are often treated more generously than fences: some insurers cover storm damage to a boundary wall while excluding it for fences and gates on the same policy.
Before any claim or repair, check whose boundary it is. Your deeds answer it, and you cannot claim on your policy for a fence that belongs to your neighbour.
Quick Answer
| Partly. Fences, gates, and garden walls fall under buildings insurance, but storm damage, the most common cause of fence destruction is excluded on almost every standard policy. Defaqto found only 1% of UK buildings policies cover storm damage to fences and gates. Fences are usually covered for vehicle impact, vandalism, and fire, and solid garden walls often carry wider cover than fences, subject to policy terms. |
Aviva’s research found that 22% of UK homes suffered storm damage in the last five years, and the most common casualty by a distance is the garden fence. Which makes the market’s position on fences one of the stranger corners of home insurance: the most likely thing to destroy your fence is the one peril your policy almost certainly excludes. According to Defaqto’s analysis of the UK market, just 1% of buildings insurance policies cover storm damage to fences and gates.
Why is storm damage to fences excluded?
Because insurers treat it as inevitable rather than unexpected. Insurance covers sudden, unforeseen events, and a fence panel in a British winter does not qualify. Fences present a large flat surface to the wind, they are anchored by posts rather than foundations, and they degrade in the weather year-round. From an underwriting perspective, storm damage to a fence is not a risk, it is a schedule.
There is a second trap even where a policy does extend to fences: the storm definition. Most insurers define a storm by wind speed, commonly gusts of around 55mph, and the Financial Ombudsman Service’s guidance on storm damage disputes shows how often that definition decides a claim. Wind below the threshold means no storm occurred in policy terms, and a fence that came down in a 45mph gust was, by that logic, a fence that was already failing.
What damage to fences and garden walls is covered?
The exclusion is specific to weather. Fences, gates, and garden walls sit within buildings cover for other insured perils, subject to your policy terms. In practice that usually means:
Vehicle impact. If an identified driver hits your fence, their motor insurance pays. If it is a hit-and-run, your buildings policy usually responds.
Vandalism and malicious damage. Deliberate damage to boundary structures is typically an insured peril, though most insurers require a crime reference number.
Fire. A fence destroyed by fire is covered under the same peril that protects the main structure.
Subsidence only alongside the house. The ABI’s subsidence guidance confirms garden walls, fences, and gates are excluded from subsidence cover unless the main house is damaged in the same event.
Solid garden walls are the exception worth checking. Some insurers treat a brick or stone boundary wall as part of the building’s permanent structure and cover it for storm damage, while excluding fences, gates, and hedges on the same policy. The distinction sits in the policy definitions, not the summary, and it can be worth several thousand pounds when a winter storm takes out forty metres of boundary.
