First hour: make it safe, not perfect
- Stay off the roof and out from under it. Loose tiles come down without warning, and a wet roof in wind is genuinely dangerous. Move cars off the drive and keep everyone away from the gable ends.
- Contain the water inside. Buckets under the drips, move furniture, lift carpets if you can. If a ceiling is bulging with trapped water, that water needs somewhere to go — a small hole in the lowest point of the bulge, with a bucket underneath, is safer than the whole ceiling coming down at once.
- Turn off electrics in the affected area at the consumer unit if water is anywhere near lights or sockets.
- Photograph everything before anyone touches it. This is the step people skip and regret.
What to photograph for your insurer
Insurers pay claims that are easy to believe. Give them a set of photographs taken before any repair, ideally timestamped:
- Wide shots of the whole property from the front, back and both sides, showing the damage in context.
- Close-ups of the damaged area, zoomed from the ground — you do not need to climb anything.
- Any tiles, ridge sections or debris that landed in the garden, where they landed.
- Every damaged area inside: ceilings, walls, floors, and the contents affected.
- The loft space, showing daylight or water ingress.
Then note the date and the name of the storm if it had one. Met Office named storms make claims markedly more straightforward, because the insurer can verify wind speeds in your postcode without argument.
Talking to your insurer
Call them before you commission any permanent repair. Almost every policy allows — and expects — you to make the property safe immediately, and will cover the cost of a temporary repair. What they generally will not do is pay for a full replacement that was carried out before they had the chance to inspect.
Two things worth knowing. First, storm damage means sudden damage: insurers will not pay for a roof that was already at the end of its life and finally gave up, and they will look at the age and condition of the covering. Second, you are entitled to use your own contractor rather than the insurer's approved list — you may need to push, and a written quote with photographs makes that conversation much shorter.
We are happy to produce a report with photographs, a description of the damage and an itemised quote in the format loss adjusters expect. It costs you nothing and it removes most of the friction.
The doorstep problem
Storms bring roofers, and not all of them are roofers. After every serious blow across Sussex and Surrey, vans appear offering to fix your roof today, cash, while they're in the area.
Some are perfectly legitimate. The ones that are not share a pattern: no address you can visit, a mobile number only, pressure to decide immediately, a demand for money up front, and a claim to have spotted a problem you cannot see from the ground. A common trick is to be genuinely fixing a neighbour's roof, which lends the whole thing credibility.
You are never obliged to decide on the doorstep. Take the company name, check it exists at a real address with a real trading history, and get a second quote. A roof that has already lost tiles will survive another two days under a tarpaulin.
Our guide to choosing a roofer in Crawley goes through the checks in more detail.
What a temporary repair should cost
An emergency call-out to make a roof safe and watertight — tarpaulin, battened down, tiles re-set where they can be — typically runs £180 to £450 depending on time of day, access and how much scaffold or ladder work is involved. Anyone quoting four figures to put a sheet on your roof is charging for your panic.
The permanent repair comes afterwards, in daylight, with a proper price and your insurer in the loop.
Last reviewed August 2026 by the Bonwycks Roofing team. Prices are genuine local ranges for Crawley and the surrounding towns and are reviewed twice a year — your own quote will always be specific to your roof.