Numbers Attending Means Move to Bigger Venue

An insurance company claimants meeting in Christchurch next Tuesday has had to move to a larger venue because so many people want to attend.

Southern No Response (SNR) co-organiser Peter Glasson says the meeting has been moved to the Jack Mann Auditorium at the College of Education in Ilam after the original venue limit of 250 people at the WestPac Hub was exceeded this week and interest in attending continues to grow.

“We are almost at 300 now after originally planning for 250 and I know of several groups of claimants who haven’t secured a seat yet,” he says.

The group acknowledges that it appears some of the “blockages” for some claimants have been cleared which could be the result of a public promise made by Southern Response’s CEO, Peter Rose, to allow his senior staff more discretion in the decision making around claims. However Glasson sounds a word of warning.

“Some who originally had significant movement with their claims after the protests last year have hit brick walls again, and some who felt major decisions had been made by SR enabling them (the claimant) to move forward, have had those decisions changed completely,” he says.

One of the spokespeople for SNR, Ali Jones, was thrilled late last year to finally have SR declare her home was “uneconomic to repair” and on the 17th December a claims team offered her and her husband (supported at the meeting by a lawyer and insurance advocate), an election to rebuild and they subsequently accepted this election. Jones and her husband have this week received a letter from SR’s lawyers which says SR did not say their house was uneconomic to repair and that it never made that election offer to them.

“The family is shattered,” says Peter. “And they are not the only ones and that is why SNR must keep up the pressure on Southern Response which will pack its bags and be off into the sunset in 10 months time, leaving behind it a wake of human misery.”

Peter says his claim has not progressed at all and he has been told this week of a woman who has been living in the temporary village in Kaiapoi for two and a half years with little or no progress from SR. He adds this has still not been looked into further so he can’t confirm details around that case yet.
“The unreasonable and in most cases inexplicable delay related to claims is still the most common problem and as we have said in the past, Southern Response and Arrow International’s processes are at the centre of this issue,” he says.

The meeting next week includes a number of experienced professionals working in and around the rebuild – see attached agenda and speaker bio’s.
ENDS

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