The super-rich are not beyond fiddling their insurance policies when times get tough, Robert Hiscox, the insurer to some of Britain's wealthiest people, said yesterday.

Mr Hiscox, chairman of the eponymous insurer, said that his company had not seen signs yet of financial strain among its high-net-worth customers. “At the moment, there's still plenty of cash, [but] it's going to come. We're in a lull,” he said.

“Financial pressure will bring a certain moral hazard. In a recession, you get more pressure to use insurance policies as a liquid asset. People stop being as careful with their possessions.”

In a typically outspoken interview to mark Hiscox's record interim results, the insurer's 65-year-old chairman criticised police for being slow to catch the Johnson family, a burglary gang jailed this month after a series of raids on stately homes. He accused officers of being uninterested because the gang's victims were wealthy and insured. “We were very involved in trying to get the police to do something about it,” he said, “but it took an unconscionably long time.”

Hiscox reported a 14.6 per cent rise in pre-tax profit to £16.3 million at its British and European business, which has its personal lines division.

The insurer said that it would stop offering insurance to its mid-market customers - those with about £75,000 in home contents - through brokers and would move the cover online.

Despite his optimism on Hiscox's outlook, the veteran insurer predicted that Britain was sliding into a recession far worse than that of the early 1990s. “Normally a bit of a recession is good - it gets rid of the froth and brings sanity into values and God knows we need that,” he said, “but this is going to be deeper than our previous experience.”

Mr Hiscox, who joined his father's Lloyds of London insurance syndicate in 1965, also railed against the dearth of experience in bank boardrooms, particularly in the United States, which he said had contributed to their huge losses in the credit crunch.

“The banks don't have a single director who has been around for more than 15 years because corporate governance rules say that you're useless after ten years,” he said. “How are they expected to have any corporate memory?”

He could not resist cocking a snook at the banks. “We've been told for years: 'Why don't you do risk analysis like the banks do?' But when it came down to it, they didn't even know what they had on their books. We always want to know what we've got.”

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