What a boon the Continuous Insurance Enforcement law has been for the Motor Insurer’s Bureau since its introduction three years ago. The new law, which now gives the MIB permission to access DVLA databases and cross-reference its records with their own has been accredited, at least in part, to a marked fall in the volume of youngsters on UK roads driving whilst uninsured.
This has got to be good news for those looking to budget for cheap van insurance this year and into the future. Alongside the role that comparison van insurance sites have played in helping bring down the cost of commercial vehicle cover, paying for other drivers who illegally take to the road without valid insurance was also blamed for the spiralling costs associated with van cover in recent times.
Keep up with your van insurance – you have been warned!
In the three years since its introduction, the act of cross-referencing DVLA records with insurance documentation and the means to do something about it has led to the number of drivers between 17 and 20 driving without cover being spliced in half, according to MIB figures. Incredibly, there are 1.2m uninsured drivers in the UK alone, of which approximately 120,000 are judged to be in this age range. Given those two statements, that’s 40,000 extra young drivers every year taking out insurance that otherwise wouldn’t be doing so since the EIC was introduced. Let’s hope that insurance companies plough that money back into the industry and start to offer van drivers, historically the safest group of drivers on the roads, the cheap van insurance they were used to before prices began their unchallenged climb.
The overall figure that driving without insurance is estimated to cost law-abiding citizens who do pay their premiums religiously is about £30 per policy, per person. According to Ashton West, CEO of MIB, that bill stands at roughly £400m per annum in additional costs to an industry in which many firms are financially delicately poised in light of the pay outs faced in recent times for an unprecedented rise in bogus whiplash injury claims and large scale crash-for-cash scams.
For young van drivers looking for cheap van insurance, all they can see is a chicken and egg syndrome. Young drivers can’t afford insurance, which, according to one recent report, suggests has risen 20% for the under-twenty-ones in twelve months, thus putting renewal policies beyond their reach; however, they still drive. In retaliation, or at least to balance the books, insurance firms increase policy prices and van insurance quotes to counteract the amount of young drivers ducking their insurance responsibility. Both instances combine to continually raise the cost for the professional young van driver making it harder for them to obtain affordable cover.
Let’s hope that the CIE continues to reduce the amount of young drivers who make up the 1.2m uninsured drivers on UK roads and address their pricing strategy, accordingly. To see how much you could save as a young driver looking for cheap van insurance, why not test our comparison site? You may well save a packet in minutes; what have you got to lose?
