Lapsed policy

My father was double debited in August as he missed payment in July, since than he has been debited for the house insurance and the next debit was supposed to be on the 1st November. Now that we had a crisis at home and he wanted to claim he is told that the claim cannot be processed as the policy lapsed. Our concern is if it has lapsed why we were not notified and what happened to the amounts that were being debited by absa. This is the ***** that insurance companies do when it comes to processing a claim.