One video uncovered during a recent claim shows someone walking through an empty pub, announcing where they are, and panning across the deserted bar and the damage around it. When investigators put the footage to the claimant, the answer came back that it was fake and made with AI.
Disputes like that are likely to become more common as buildings sit empty for longer, and they raise questions about how owners secure, inspect and maintain them. Since August 17, 2026, planning policy in England has required proposals to convert pubs on commercial viability grounds to demonstrate there is no reasonable prospect of continued use, backed by evidence of at least a year’s marketing.
Sarah Durkin, director of investigation services at loss adjuster Woodgate & Clark, said how much an owner spends on securing, checking and maintaining an empty building depends on how long it will be empty and what they plan to do with it.
In the pub case, Durkin’s team matched the damage in the video with photographs taken by its own adjuster. But a determined claimant could still argue the footage had been generated from those very photographs. “How far do you take it?” she said.
The distinction is between establishing a breach of a policy condition and proving dishonesty. The latter can be harder to establish when the authenticity of the evidence is disputed.
“It may well be that we end up declining more claims for breaches rather than being able to prove fraud,” she said.
That puts the focus on whether a policyholder can show they met the conditions of cover. The exposure extends beyond pubs to other large, ageing premises, including care homes awaiting redevelopment, former social clubs, empty supermarkets and offices left underused by hybrid working. Some insurers actively write unoccupied property, while others are trying to shed it from their books.
Those that take it on want to know why a building is empty, how long it will stay that way and what the endgame is, Durkin said. A property being refurbished for new tenants might be accepted as unoccupied for three months, with occupancy expected after that. A site with planning permission for redevelopment is a different proposition. For a pub already standing empty, a year-long marketing period could extend the vacancy well beyond that window.
If circumstances change, the insurer should be told, but that often does not happen. In other cases the risk is misrepresented from the start, and buildings declared occupied at inception never were.
In one case, Durkin said, a former supermarket in the Midlands was insured as occupied, with tenants supposedly on a rent-free period while they got the building ready to trade. About nine weeks into the policy, a £1.5m claim arrived for stripped copper cabling and boilers. The tenants did not exist. No fencing or bollards had been put up, and an encampment had occupied the car park for weeks. When challenged, the policyholders produced a photograph of Heras fencing they had taken from a local contractor and propped up. “They just didn’t want to spend any money on it,” she said.
Durkin said typical unoccupied property conditions include internal and external inspections every seven days, a log of visits, water systems drained and electrics switched off unless they power an alarm. In her experience, the external check often happens and the internal one does not.
She wants to see a contemporaneous log, ideally timestamped. What her team often receives is one made up once the claim is under way, recording visits at suspiciously regular times, “every Friday at 10 o’clock”. A responsible landlord should have someone checking the property, boarding it up after a break-in and reporting incidents to the police and the insurer. “That’s what they should be doing, but we don’t see that very often.”
The photos and screenshots offered as proof are also getting harder to trust. WhatsApp and Facebook strip out the metadata that can show when and where an image was taken, and AI-detection tools give a probability rather than a verdict. Durkin has seen demonstrations of AI producing a claim form and every supporting document from start to finish.
In one claim, the time and date on a screenshot had been altered. Durkin’s preferred response is a face-to-face interview in which the investigator looks at the phone in real time and takes their own screenshots. Where messages are disputed, the investigator asks each party separately for their copy.
“Before we were just happy to accept screenshots, and I just don’t think we can at all,” she said.
Even policyholders who want to comply are not always told what compliance looks like. There is no standard way to evidence an inspection, and some conditions are openly subjective, such as a requirement to make reasonable checks with a prospective tenant’s previous landlord.
“What’s a reasonable check?” she said. A landlord who can show they rang the previous landlord in good faith, on a given date before agreeing the tenancy, at least has something to point to. “You really need to watch your wording and be very specific about what you expect and what the standards are.”
After her team delivered fraud awareness training to one insurer client, the insurer asked for its input on policy wording.
As vacancies lengthen, the claims most likely to hold up will be those where the policy set out what checks were expected and the owner kept the records to prove them.
