U.K. court says insurers on hook for coverage if deliberate damage is done as a result of insanity

A recent England and Wales High Court (Queen’s Bench Division) says insurers are on the hook to provide coverage when an insured deliberately causes damage to his or her property, so long as the insured meets the legal definition of insanity at the time the damage was done.
The English case, Porter v. Zurich Insurance Company, comes within a year after a similar issue came before the Ontario Superior Court in May 2008.
In England, the high court found that an insurance claimant, Raymond Thomas Porter, deliberately set fire to his home in a suicide attempt. But while the house was ablaze, Porter changed his mind and fled.
Zurich denied Porter’s claim on the principle that an insured cannot recover insurance on the basis of his or her own illegal act.
Porter argued that his thoughts at the time were “so grossly impaired that he was not acting as a free agent.”
The high court found that “where a claimant seeks to recover under a policy of insurance for the consequences of his own act in setting a fire, they will need to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that they were insane within the meaning of the M’Naghten Rules, at the time of the fire.”
The M’Naghton Rules state: “…to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of committing the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as to not know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know it was wrong.”
The court found Porter knew that what he was doing was wrong, and therefore he did not meet the legal definition of insanity.
The English case comes within a year of the Ontario case, Cipkar v. RBC General Insurance Company, which has not been decided yet at trial.
In Cipkar, Mihal Cipkar started a fire that took his life. His wife, Anna Cipkar, tried to make a claim on the house insurance, but RBC denied the claim, noting that the insured, Mihal Cipkar, deliberately set the fire himself.
Anna Cipkar’s lawers argued that Mihal would have been found not criminally responsible for arson, because he was in a delusional state when he set the fire.
In its endorsement saying a trial would be necessary to resolve the case, the Ontario Superior Court noted there was a lack of supporting case law dealing with this type of situation in Canada.