I had another essay on this crisis ready to publish. It is now in a drawer. Some weeks ago, after I had spent this paper’s patience arguing that Jamaica’s property insurance market is failing the very people it exists to protect, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) reached out and asked to meet. So I set the essay aside and went to listen instead. I want to tell you what I found, because it changed the piece I thought I was going to write.

I spoke, by phone, with the man who runs the FSC, Lieutenant Colonel Keron Burrell. The next day, seven of his colleagues joined me on a video call. They could not have been kinder. Colonel Burrell was warm, patient, and plainly sincere. His team had read the arguments, asked sharp questions, and listened to a homeowner — still without a roof eight months after Hurricane Melissa — with what I can only call genuine empathy. Let me say it plainly: The people at the FSC mean well. They want to help. I will happily keep talking to them for as long as it is useful.

But empathy is not a remedy. And somewhere in those conversations I understood, more clearly than ever, where the problem truly lies. A recurring question was whether anything illegal had been done to me. It is a fair question, and I understand why they must ask it. But the honest answer is no. Nothing illegal happened. Large insurers do not break the law; they are far too sophisticated for that, and they have no need to. The law and the contracts are already written in their favour.

Consider the unfairness at the heart of it: When you hire an electrician, he does not hand you a blank sheet and ask you to specify the wire gauge and the breaker sizes, and then, when the panel fails, blame you for what you left off. He is the expert; working out what the job needs is his job, and he answers for it if he gets it wrong. The same is true of the doctor who orders the test and the engineer who sizes the beam. In every trade the professional carries the duty of competence, and the customer is entitled to rely on it.

Property insurance is the one business that runs the other way around. It asks you, the customer, to supply the single most technical figure in the whole contract — the full rebuild cost of your home — prices the policy on your guess, and then, if the guess was too low, invokes the ‘average’ clause to cut your payout to a fraction in the very week your roof is gone. All of it perfectly legal.

Then there is the figure almost no one names: the loss adjuster. After a disaster, this is the person who comes to your property, decides what your damage is worth, and effectively sets your payout. In most cases he is hired and paid by the insurer — the man assessing your loss answers to the company writing the cheque. You may never see his full report. And the rules governing him are threadbare: an individual adjuster can be required to carry as little as $500,000 in professional-indemnity cover, a figure set in 2007 and never raised, against claims that now run to tens of millions. When an adjuster lowballs your loss or drags his feet, there is little you can do and little that happens to him. Legal, every bit of it. There is no crime to find, because the whole arrangement was made lawful long before you signed.

That is the trap in which the good people I met at the FSC are caught. They can sympathise. They can ask questions. They can publish an advisory — as they did, to their credit, on the very ‘average’ clause I had been criticising. But that advisory could offer little more than to tell homeowners to keep their insured values current — which is to say, for every shopkeeper and pensioner in Jamaica to become a competent valuer of buildings, tracking construction-cost inflation year after year. That is the electrician handing you the materials list and blaming you when something is missing. It was the best they could do, because under the law, as it stands, the FSC cannot compel an insurer to treat you fairly, cannot fine one that does not, and cannot order a company to pay you what you are owed. They are a watchdog without teeth — and they know it. What struck me was not that they were unwilling to help; it was that they were not empowered to.

There is a law meant to fix precisely this — and here is the part most people miss. It was not born from a hurricane, and it was not born from insurance, it was born from allegations of fraud. In January 2023, weeks after clients of licensed brokerage firm, Stocks and Securities Limited, were alleged to have been stripped of their savings over a period of years, the Government announced it would rebuild the way the entire financial sector is policed: The Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) would take charge of solvency, and a new consumer-conduct authority would be created with a single job — deciding whether financial companies treat their customers fairly — backed, for the first time, by the power to levy fines and order a company to compensate you directly. In plain terms, it would take the kind, questioning people I spoke with and give them the authority to act on your behalf. That is the whole point of it: the difference between a regulator who feels for you and one who can help you.

If that reform is to mean anything for insurance, a few things must be written into it by name:

• the ‘average’ clause fixed so that adequacy is settled before a disaster rather than sprung on you after

• valuing your home made quick and cheap: a free, published construction cost per square foot, by building type and parish, updated yearly — never a valuation fee tied to a percentage of your home’s worth, which only prices out the people most likely to be underinsured

• hard deadlines on claims, with automatic interest when they are missed

• the loss adjuster brought under real, independent oversight — licensed, required to share his report, and accountable when he lowballs or delays

• somewhere real to turn when it all goes wrong: an independent body that can hear your complaint and order the company to pay without you having to hire a lawyer you cannot afford.

And because it was born from a brokerage failure and not a broken roof, understand how far its protection reaches. This is not an insurance law, it guards your money wherever you have entrusted it: your bank account — the fees, the mis-selling, the practices you have no power to challenge alone; your investments and the broker who holds them, which is where this whole story began; your pension, left for decades in the hands of a company you can only trust; the credit union and the money-lender; and, yes, your insurance company.

Whether you are a retiree, a student opening his/her first account, a factory worker, a farmer, or a shopkeeper who pays every premium and then learns on the worst day of his/her life that the fine print was built to fail him/her, this gives you an advocate, somewhere to turn without stepping into a legal world designed to exhaust you. That is not a luxury; it is what a modern economy owes the people who keep it running. And it is not a party issue; it belongs to no party. It belongs to Jamaicans. We say we want a modern economy; a modern economy gives its people modern protections.

So here is my worry. This legislation is stalled. The groundwork is all but done — we are told it is a Cabinet submission away — and yet it sits. And the two men most closely identified with it are leaving the stage: Dr Nigel Clarke, who announced it, has left the Government, and Richard Byles, the governor of the BOJ, who shepherded it, completes his term in August. Reforms die this way — not in open opposition, but by quiet orphaning, as their champions move on and no name is left on them. A law with no owner is never passed; it simply waits out a generation.

So let me address the two people who can now decide its fate. Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness, in June you stood at a podium and publicly challenged the private insurers to pay up Melissa claims. I was grateful to read it, and you were right to say it. But you and I both know that a challenge from a podium is not a rule with force behind it. This law is the difference, and it is a legacy waiting to be claimed: the Government that finally gave every ordinary Jamaican a real defender against the financially powerful. And Minister of Finance Fayval Williams, of anyone at the Cabinet table, you understand this best. You are a chartered financial analyst; you built your career in the very investment industry this reform was conceived to police, and you are the one now choosing Governor Byles’ successor. The file is on your desk. Finish it, table it, and give the country a date.

And do it in the open. Publish the proposed rules in plain language for public comment before they are locked. We who pay the premiums and count the losses should be able to read what is written in our name and say whether it does the job. A reform meant to protect the public should be shaped in front of the public.

I am grateful to the people at the FSC, and I meant it when I thanked them. I did not seek those conversations for sympathy; I sought them to understand why the system cannot help me — and now I do. The people are willing. The law is unfinished. The only thing missing is the authority to end the sentence. Out in Westmoreland the rain still comes in the afternoons, and there is still nothing over my head to keep it out.

So let me close where this all turned. A few weeks ago I published a column in these pages about my own stalled claim. That letter found its way to the prime minister, and days later he stood before the country and told the private insurers, in as many words, to pay up. I was moved to see it, and I thank him for it. But here is the quiet truth inside that moment: When the most powerful person in the country wants an insurer to pay, the strongest tool he has is to ask. That is the whole problem in a single sentence.

So this last word is not for the Government; it is for the rest of us. The power to turn ‘Please pay’ into ‘You will pay’ does not belong to a regulator, or a prime minister, or a man writing columns in the paper, it belongs to the people who vote. Empower your Government to finish this law, and no one will ever again have to plead with an insurer to do right. You will have given the State the authority to tell them — and every bank, broker, and pension fund besides — not merely to pay up, but exactly how much they owe, and to make them pay it.

Andrew Houston Moncure is the managing director of Bluefields Bay Villas & Suites in Westmoreland. He is also a property policyholder with a Hurricane Melissa claim still in progress.

Andrew Houston Moncure