Learn from my experience with Legal & General

Learn from my very poor experience, here are several things to watch out for when dealing with legal and General.
Firstly, the incident: I have just had a very poor, expensive episode with Dynorod and Legal & General.
The short version, there was a blockage in my drains and raw sewage came up through my downstairs toilet and flooded the room.
I called my insurance company and they told me what I needed to do.
I called Dynorod (Mistake Number one - did you know that untied utilities come out and sort this free of charge, I was not aware of this and ended up paying Dynorod £500 - useful for you to know).
A team came out and traced the issue in the garden, they dug a whole, renewed the bend and left, during their time they put the cctv camera down.
I though all was well until I tried to claim from Legal and General (who I had been with for many years but not anymore after the way they treated me and did everything to try to get out of paying.
Firstly they said that if I wanted to claim on the damage inside the house caused by the issue outside I would have to pay the excess twice, one for internal cover and one for external cover even though the damage came from outside.
It turns out that the images Dynorod took were of the pipe after they repaired it which Legal and General said did not show evidence of ground movement, and I have to agree with them but they had an engineer’s report from a “leading” drain company I said would you not take the report and the word of a leading drain company as evidence as they say it was an insured peril, they said no I thought I was doing the right thing going to a big company instead of a local drainage company so that things like this would not happen, but in the end I have been left out of pocket and disillusioned by two supposed leading companies.
Summary & Tips:
• Check the small print in your insurance for what you need to provide as evidence, I do not recommend legal and general, they were so busy trying not to pay out they forgot I was a customer.
• Do not trust telephone calls (unless they are recorded) get everything in writing.
• Watch out with Legal and General when you ask to be put though to their line manager or complaints department they just give you the telephone number of the sales line and you have to go through all the stages again to get through then they do it again...they play games with you.
• Legal and general actually admitted that the report from the Dynorod engineer was worthless (even though they insisted on it) they would only accept a photograph, one even told me a photograph of the broken pipe may have sufficed, I laughed and said how would that be evidence.
• Take your problems with these companies to the Financial Conduct authority This is what I am doing now although I feel they will join forces to block me. (David and Goliath)
Dynorod and Legal and General make it very hard for you to get to someone in authority to make an official complaint but keep trying there are people in the way whose job it is to try to block you and put you off – DON’T GIVE UP, they use the fact they are so big and you do not matter because you are so small and they have lots of customers losing you does not hurt them, but if we stand up to them they will have to take us little people seriously and treat us with respect and fairly.
In my mind they should have been able to take a written report from one of Europe’s leading drainage companies as sufficient evidence, this to me is evidence they will do anything to get out of paying a claim, we are talking £500 not £100’s of thousands, I paid them much more than that, but as I say losing customers is no hardship for them.
I am putting my name to this because I feel so strongly about the way they treat us, in this day and age these companies need to go back to common sense real customer service and valuing customers.