It was on page 19 of a 31-page booklet, in a paragraph under the heading "Pedal cycles", and I had never read it. We'd had our buildings and contents policy since 15 January. I had read the summary page twice and filed the rest under "boring but presumably fine". It took Matt asking whether he could lock his bike outside a café in the Hope Valley to make me find out otherwise.
A bike worth more than twice the sofa
Some numbers first. Matt's road bike cost £1,450. Our sofa cost £600 in 2021, and I had always thought of the sofa as the expensive thing in the house and the bike as his hobby. In insurance terms the bike is the most valuable single item we own. My own bike, a second-hand hybrid, was £340. Our contents are insured for £35,000 in total, and both bikes live in the shed.
Here is what our policy said, at the time. At home, bikes were covered if they were kept in the house or in a locked outbuilding, which the shed is (it has a hasp and one of Dennis's old padlocks, which is the only thing of his that works perfectly). Away from home, they weren't covered at all. Not at the café, not on the train, not locked to a railing outside the library.
On top of that, any single item over £1,000 had to be named on the policy, or the most we would get back was £1,000. So even in our own shed, Matt's bike was only partly protected, and the moment it left the gate it was on its own.
What we added
I rang on Tuesday 10 June. The call took eight minutes. I asked for personal possessions cover away from home, and for the bike to be specified on the policy at £1,450. They wanted its make and frame number, which I read off the underside of the frame by lying on the shed floor with a head torch and my phone. The two changes added £38 a year to the premium. The new documents were in my inbox before I had put the phone down, and I did what I should have done in January and read all of them.
While I had the booklet open I read the rest of it too, including the line saying accidental damage isn't covered in our first year, which I will bear in mind next time I pick up anything expensive and fragile. We also walked round the house photographing each room, with drawers open, so there is a record of what we own.
The lock wording
The bit I would have missed completely was the condition attached to the away-from-home cover. The bike had to be locked to something immovable, and the lock had to meet a stated security standard. Ours named the Sold Secure scheme, Silver rating or above. Matt's lock was a chain he bought in 2016, and when we turned it over to look for a rating there wasn't one. "It's been fine for nine years," he said, which is also what people say about rewireable fuse boards.
He bought a D-lock with a Sold Secure Gold rating for £48. He has also started talking about fitting a ground anchor in the shed floor, which isn't in any wording we've read, but he teaches design and technology and he has opinions. We photographed both bikes, wrote down the frame numbers, and put the receipts in the folder with the policy. Matt dug his out of an email from 2022. Mine was a text message from a man on Marketplace, and that will have to do.
The small print, again
I can only tell you what ours said, in June 2025, from our insurer. Yours will say something different, so check your own wording, and if a line isn't clear, ask your insurer or broker rather than a blog. What I would say is that the bike clause was nowhere near the summary, and I only found it because someone wanted to go for a ride. The small print has cost us £38 a year and a £48 lock, which is cheap for the reading I should have done in January.
