Why sealant decides so many bathroom claims
Almost every home buildings wording covers escape of water from a fixed pipe, tank, appliance or heating installation, and almost every one of them excludes damage caused by failed or missing grout and sealant. A shower sits on the wrong side of that line by default. Water appears on a kitchen ceiling under a bathroom, an adjuster attends, and unless somebody proves otherwise the file is closed as a maintenance issue.
Three Financial Ombudsman decisions published in the last two years deal with exactly that situation. The facts are close enough to be interchangeable. The outcomes are not. Reading them next to each other is the single most useful thing we can point a customer at, because it shows what the argument is actually about, and it is not the sealant.
DRN-5970477: the refusal that was overturned
A policyholder noticed damp on a wall below a bathroom in late November 2024 and asked their plumber to look at it. The plumber inspected the shower tray and sealant and found nothing: no gaps, no deterioration, no mould. Over Christmas, with the family away and the shower unused, the ceiling below started to show damage, and a week after that it collapsed completely.
Advantage Insurance instructed a surveying agent and a leak detection firm. Flood testing showed water seeping through the shower frame, and the detection report concluded there had been an ongoing leak through the shower seals that had rotted the wooden support frame. Advantage declined the claim under the exclusion for damage "caused by the failure or lack of grouting or sealant known to you or that you ought to have been aware of", and under the general wear and tear exclusion. The Ombudsman Service investigator agreed with the insurer.
The Ombudsman did not. The decision turns on a single finding: what was the predominant cause. Photographs taken once the tiles came off showed a heavily corroded valve bracket and rotten timber above sealant level. The insurer’s own agent had dictated a note on site referring to water dripping from the shower valve and rust staining on it. The decision records that the timber damage revealed after the shower was dismantled was "indicative of a much more significant and long-term leak occurring behind the tiles".
On the exclusions, the decision is blunt. Some sealant had come away by late January, but that was a peripheral factor, not the predominant cause. Any gap in it was not obvious from the photographs, so it was neither known to the policyholder nor something they ought to have been aware of. And on wear and tear, the Ombudsman wrote that the service "wouldn’t expect a claim to be excluded where the predominant issue was hidden from view". Advantage was directed to process the claim with those exclusions discounted.
One line in that decision is worth sitting with. Because the insurer’s own experts had not identified the pipework behind the tiles as the likely cause, the Ombudsman reasoned the policyholder could not be expected to have known about it either.
DRN-4600494: the refusal that stood
Water came through a ceiling while a shower was running. The policyholder’s plumber wrote a letter saying the cause was a loose nut on the cold inlet pipe to the shower, which he had tightened, stopping the leak. Admiral’s loss adjuster reported that the water was escaping between the wall panels and the bath through defective sealant, and that there was no water damage around the shower valve at all.
The Ombudsman did not uphold the complaint. The reasoning is short and it is about evidence, not plumbing. The plumber’s letter "hasn’t given very much detail". The adjuster’s report contained photographs and recorded the absence of damage around the area the plumber had identified, which is what you would expect to find if water had been running there for some time. The policyholder’s argument that a splashback behind the tiles would have kept the wall watertight did not persuade the Ombudsman that water could not have tracked down between splashback, tile and bath.
The exclusion was the same kind of clause. The difference was that nothing on the policyholder’s side of the file was strong enough to make a competing cause more likely than the insurer’s.
DRN-4550974: good-looking seals that were still passing water
The third one matters because it shows the trap in the other direction. A policyholder found water damage to the floor and beams under a shower tray and to the kitchen ceiling. Liverpool Victoria sent a building company, which said trace and access was needed, and then a leak detection company, which found shower tray movement and failed sealant to the screen.
The policyholder pointed out that the detection report itself said the sealant was in good condition. That is true, and the Ombudsman accepted it. But the detection company, asked about it during the claim, explained that although the seals looked sound they were passing water in places and possibly had been for some time, and appeared to have been recently renewed in an attempt to stop the leak. The report also confirmed no evidence of an escape of water from pipework anywhere in the property.
The complaint was not upheld. The wording covered "water or oil leaking from any fixed tank, domestic appliance or pipe", and the decision records that the policyholder had not produced evidence that any of those was the source.
What actually separated them
| Decision | Outcome | What decided it |
|---|
| DRN-5970477 | Upheld | Photographs of a corroded valve and rotten timber above sealant level, taken once the shower was dismantled. The insurer’s own site note had flagged the valve. |
| DRN-4600494 | Not upheld | A short plumber’s letter against a photographed adjuster’s report that found no damage where the plumber said the leak was. |
| DRN-4550974 | Not upheld | A detection report that ruled pipework out, and follow-up evidence explaining why seals in good condition were still passing water. |
In all three, both sides agreed water had come out of a bathroom and damaged a ceiling. In all three, the wording excluded sealant failure. What moved one of them was a photographic record of the concealed pipework, produced after the shower came apart, that made a different cause more likely than the excluded one.
What that means for the evidence you gather
The practical lesson from DRN-5970477 is about timing. The evidence that won it did not exist when the adjuster attended. It appeared when the tiles came off, and somebody photographed what was behind them before the repair went in. If your shower is being stripped out, that is the moment, and it does not come back.
Three things are worth recording before anything is made good: the state of the pipework and any bracketry behind the tiles, the condition of the timber and how far up the wall it is damaged, and the moisture readings with their locations noted. Our leak detection report is written to carry that, because the arguments in these three decisions are all about the same missing photograph. The general principle sits on the bathroom leak claim page, and the exclusion itself on gradual damage.
Read this properly
These are three decisions about three policies. Every Ombudsman decision is reached on its own policy wording and its own facts, and none of them creates a precedent that binds your insurer or anyone else’s. A decision going one way on a shower valve in 2025 does not tell you what happens to your claim. What these three do show is where the argument lives, which is a different and more useful thing.
If your claim has been refused, ask your insurer for a written final response quoting the exact clause it relies on. The Financial Ombudsman Service will review it free of charge if eight weeks pass without one, or if you disagree with the one you get, and you have six months from the date on it.
When not to call us
If the sealant round your tray genuinely has gone and the damage stopped at the bathroom floor, that is a tube of sealant and an afternoon, and no wording we have seen would pay for it. If the ceiling below has come down, the priority is making the area safe, not gathering evidence. And if you are a leaseholder and the water is coming from the flat above, read who pays for a leak from the flat above before you instruct anybody, because the liability question comes first.
Where a proper investigation is the right answer, we work at £150 per hour agreed before we attend, and if we do not find the leak you do not pay for the time we spent looking. Book an engineer.
