Tag: car insurance

Best insurance deals only for few, despite what insurers say

Posted on by News Desk

Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 7 Feb 2014:

Car insurance companies love saying how cover is cheaper than ever, but let’s be honest: only for a select few customers. The rest of us pay big.

The latest load of bollocks from the car and van insurance industry has surfaced, courtesy of the Association of British Insurers. The ABI says that the average price of a comprehensive insurance policy is now only £370 – an amazing drop of 9 percentage points over last year. While on the face of it this sounds like cause to celebrate – and I’ll admit I felt some initial relief upon reading these new figures – but then I noticed one very important facet: it’s just an ‘average.’

Do you know what that means? There are people who supposedly pay less than this (though heavens knows where these people live) and there are also shedloads of people who pay more. Who pays more than the average amount of £370? Well ask yourself – how much did you pay for your insurance this year? I’ll wager it’s more than that – much more, if you happen to make a living driving a van or if you’re a younger driver. Heaven help you if you’re both!

Younger drivers are absolutely raked over the coals by insurers. In fact insurance companies charge younger Brits so much that they’re often priced right out of keeping a vehicle unless they get some help from their parents; unfortunately there’s a growing trend where well-meaning parents actually end up breaking the law by putting their children on their own policies as a secondary driver even when they’re not.

It’s called fronting, and it’s quite illegal. Apparently insurers don’t like it when you tell them a car is being driven only occasionally by a secondary driver and then in actuality is driven every day by them instead. Being caught fronting can invalidate the insurance for that car, and that could mean a big repair bill that you’ll have to pay out-of-pocket if you get into an accident. It could also complicate things down the line when you try to get insurance cover on your own – insurers take a bit of a dim view of the activity.

I know it’s illegal but what else are younger Brits supposed to do if their premiums are so high as to be completely unaffordable? No, I’m not condoning the behaviour, but I can say that I understand it implicitly.

Insurance rates down, while other costs threaten on horizon

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Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 31 Jan 2013:

It’s true that some motoring costs like car insurance and van insurance have eased this year, but unfortunately other costs are rising higher and higher.

The good news is that insurance rates have fallen by 14.1 per cent year-on-year according to the AA’s latest research. This is even more noteworthy because the motoring organisation has never seen such a drop ever; the source of the downward spiral has been linked to insurers both responding to a highly competitive environment and trying to stay ahead of the curve prior to new rules that could be going into effect soon that are specifically engineered to reduce the impact of fraudulent whiplash claims.

Now if this keeps up it will be fantastic, but shedloads of insurance experts say that there’s a danger of things dropping down so low that the market can’t support it, with the result of prices rebounding back up towards much more expensive rates. However, even if this doesn’t happen there are some ridiculous other costs that motorists have to worry about, and anyone who makes a living behind the wheel like a white van man has to worry about things like road fines, which have been rocketing upwards over the years.

In fact, new research discovered that motorists had to pay more than 1.3 million road fines during the 2011-2012 financial year, all for minor offences. This was found to be 16 per cent higher than the previous year – and represented a cost of £135 million to all the motorists that had to pay these fines! That’s a lot of money, and it’s most likely less about keeping the roads safe and more about generating revenue for local authorities. I mean let’s be serious here for a moment – do we really need all these traffic cameras set up in strange locations that aren’t necessarily high-accident areas just so the local council can generate some more money for their coffers?

Let’s get real – the nation’s roads are much safer then they’ve ever been, and I highly doubt that it’s the number of traffic cameras or motoring offences that are being handed out by police. Accident rates have been coming down consistently for years, and I’d like to know if there’s any research linking higher road offences to safer roads; somehow I sincerely doubt it though. Why are the roads safer than ever but local authorities are penalising drivers for this? We don’t need this kind of madness on our roads, as it’s hard enough to keep the fuel tank full with rising petrol costs and other things.

Van insurance rate drops shape up to be short lived indeed

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Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 24 Jan 2014:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like the latest round of car and van insurance rate drops are likely to be the last for quite some time.

Turns out that some research from a leading insurance comparison website discovered that the last quarter of 2013 saw year-on-year rate drops of 12.5 per cent. This is fantastic news of course – especially since now the average comprehensive car insurance policy is only £644 – but this could easily be the last large downward trend in insurance rates for the foreseeable future.

Now for some classes of motorists this isn’t necessarily anything new. Younger drivers are quite used to insurers taking the piss out of them whenever they can, especially since it’s easier to give up an arm and a leg than it is to secure cover at a reasonable price if you’re under the age of 25 or so. Still, there was some hope that rates would continue to decline, especially for any younger Brits that drove a van for a living, but these hopes have more or less been dashed all to pieces after an independent report revealed that the competition between insurers – which had been driving premiums down in a price war – has leveled off.

That’s right – insurers have called a truce on their price war, set aside their differences, and banded together against their real enemy: all of us. Now that prices won’t slide downwards any more, insurers are quite happy – and their investors are just chuffed to bits. In fact, once news broke about the end of the price wars, stock prices for the major British insurers all rose – some as high as 5.6 per cent!

So in the end what does this mean for you and me? Well I think that it’s a safe bet to say that prices are likely to remain flat for the time being, which is better than nothing – and certainly better than having rates climb higher again! Still it’s disappointing to see the downward slide come to an end, especially since rates were so close to being acceptable for the first time since the credit crisis and resultant economic downturn. We’ll all just have to grin and bear it, I suppose!

Do yourself a favour and stay off the roadways!

Posted on by News Desk

Some days it just doesn’t seem like it’s safe to get out of bed in the morning, much less go out and take to the nation’s roadways. Today is one of those days.

Why is it so dangerous to go motoring about nowadays? Well apparently because the worst driver in the history of the UK – some magnificent bastard with 45 penalty points on his licence – is being allowed to drive about with relative impunity!

For most normal individuals, we can kiss our ability to drive goodbye if we accrue a measly 12 points, but not so for this Liverpool native. Apparently there’s a loophole where you’re allowed to keep driving if having your licence suspended would subject you to ‘extreme hardship’ or some other bollocks. Well that’s all fair and good but what about the rest of us who have to share the road with this madman? Furthermore, how does this bloke even afford car insurance at this point – and even more to the point, what insurance company is going to offer this madman cover with 45 bloody points on his licence? Did he have to remortgage his house in order to afford a year’s worth of insurance?

But there is one small bright light shining through such a morass of madness this week; in addition to the news of the worst Brit to ever climb behind the wheel comes some indication that insurance fraudsters are beginning to be rooted out by the authorities.

Truth be told, fraud hurts us all, not just car or van insurance companies, as the increased costs that an insurer pays out on fraudulent claims ends up being funneled back to its customers in the form of increased premium prices. However, since it’s in the best interest of insurers to strike back at fraudsters there has been a concerted effort to eradicate insurance scam activity – and one company recently announced that 2013 saw it avoiding having to pay more than £37 million in fraudulent claims.

It’s a good start, and as long as this kind of investigation is kept up I can’t see how we can’t start seeing some cheaper insurance rates sometime soon in the future. Well, cheaper rates for everyone except the lunatic with 45 points on his licence, I’m assuming. I swear how in the world do you get 45 bloody points on your licence?

Premium prices drop, fraud incidents go up; welcome to 2014

Posted on by News Desk

Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 3 Jan 2014:

IThe New Year is upon us, and that means this week it’s nothing but new annual reports coming out; unfortunately it’s very much a mixed bag going into 2014.

First off, if you remember this time last year there was an absolute riot in the car insurance industry because the EU Gender Directive had just gone into effect a few weeks prior. The sky was definitely falling when it came to premium price predictions, as the new EU rules that forbade using gender as a determination for car or van insurance rates was supposedly going to ratchet up prices into the stratosphere for female.

Meanwhile, a major insurance comparison site released its annual price report this week, and it looks like that a year on from the gender directive has led to lowered premiums across the entire industry. Both women and men are paying less on average than they did just 12 short months ago, though there were some discrepancies when it came to young Brits – those unfortunates that are never going to get a good deal on their insurance just by virtue of their inexperience.

Meanwhile, even as the market improves overall these desperate younger Brits have found themselves targeted increasingly by shadow brokers – a particularly crafty and cruel subset of fraudsters that pose as legitimate insurance brokers but simply pocket a victim’s money and disappear. The worst part about these bastards is that they’ll not just shake down poor luckless younger Brits but they’ll actually supply their victims with documents that are completely bogus but are designed to trick them into thinking they’ve got valid cover.

Do you know what happens when you’re caught out without valid cover? You’re in deep trouble, that’s what. It doesn’t matter to insurers if you were hoodwinked by one of these ghost brokers – they just see you as someone who was motoring about with invalidated insurance, and that means you’re going to be hard-pressed to find any insurance provider that will offer you actual, real and valid cover for anything less than an arm and a leg. Of course, most insurers will simply refuse to even provide you a price quote. I think it’s unfair but what can we do?

Christmas season leaves coal in all our stockings

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Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 27 Dec 2013:

Ever have one of those Christmas seasons where nothing goes right and it doesn’t matter what you do to change it? That’s exactly what’s happened this week.

First up is how the fallout from the Competition Commission’s latest report positively ruined Christmas for the shareholders of one major car insurance provider. Admiral Group saw its stock price take a tumble earlier this week after the Commission revealed that many car and van insurance providers are wringing extra cash from their customers in the form of ratcheted up costs for car hire and repair services. Apparently investors take a dim view to their portfolio being made up of companies that are caught red-handed in padding their profit margins by charging over and above the fair market price for their services – especially when some of these general and commercial van insurance companies are insisting on shoddy repair work being done and then charging as if it was not substandard.

It’s absolutely horrid to discover your insurer isn’t just treating you like a cash cow but is content to beat the cow to death for the leather. Still, things go on unabated for many insurers – and all too many customers, which is where the other half of this week’s bad Christmas story comes in – it turns out that things are so bad in Northern Ireland when it comes to insurance costs that the Consumer Council is telling residents to dump their existing insurer and shop around for a better deal. In fact, motoring costs in NI are so high that it’s often impossible to get a good deal on things like petrol or insurance, despite best efforts – not exactly the kind of Christmas message you want to get!

Hopefully the report from the Competition Commission will shake things up enough that this kind of behaviour on the part of insurers will come to an abrupt end. For what it’s worth there’s all too much of this when it comes to insurance companies taking hard advantage of their customers, especially in markets like Northern Ireland! Enough is enough; it’s one thing to run a company to make a profit and it’s another one altogether to do whatever it takes to make as much profit as possible – it’s just bloody wrong if you ask me!

And this is exactly why we need the Competition Commission to step in and change things as far as the insurance market is concerned. If you ask me, there’s no way the industry itself will regulate itself, especially not when all these companies are in business to make a profit; you need to have an outside source ensure that everyone’s playing fair and that’s simply not happening. Until this does indeed happen, we’ll have instances like in Northern Ireland, where motorists are being urged to shop around as much as they can.

I can only hope that the Competition Commission positively throws the figurative book at the insurance industry. Let’s get some regulation in there to make sure we’re not all paying through the nose on overpriced replacement vehicles and substandard repair work!

You’re officially paying too much for your van insurance

Posted on by News Desk

Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 20 Dec 2013:

Well, it’s finally a matter of the official record: you are literally paying more than you should be for van insurance, even if you somehow got a good quote.

How can I say that with so much certainty? Well I mean everyone knows that van and car insurance companies charge you an arm and a leg, but most of the time this has meant just impotent complaining. However, this time things are different: the Competition Commission itself has finally weighed in, declaring that we’re all being taken to the cleaners by the insurance industry – and the methods insurers use to crank up the prices may come as a bit of a shock.

The Commission discovered that whether it’s a car insurance or commercial van insurance provider, they have probably been ratcheting up their premium prices in order to cover the costs they incur in over-charging their customers when it comes to car hire and repair bills.

It’s more or less a scam if you ask me, and it works brilliantly: insurers have substandard parts and shoddy workmanship to repair damaged cars and then charge full-price to whomever was at fault in the accident. The same goes for car hire costs as well – insurers inflate these costs in order to line their own pockets – and the end result is massive rate hikes for unsuspecting drivers.

The Competition Commission was quick to condemn the practice – as they should have – but the insurance industry responded to the publication of the report as well. Unsurprisingly the industry tried to spin the results to make them appear more favourable or to garner some sympathy; while the Commission recommended regulatory action be taken in order to stamp out this price-gouging behaviour on the part of the industry, repair service and car hire firms have been quick to say that any new regulations may endanger the ability of these companies to make a living!.

This is of course patently ridiculous. Only in the insurance industry can you catch a company with their hand in the cookie jar and have them vehemently deny any wrongdoing. Typical if you ask me!

Nothing like a little moral turpitude amongst insurers

Posted on by News Desk

Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 13 Dec 2013:

Now I’ll be the first person to say that most car insurance and van insurance companies aren’t pillars of the community, but there are at least some standards.

Or there were at one time, but now they’re gone. I’m not namig names here, but apparently there’s been some insurance comparison website going around Tweeting responses to news of the death of actor Paul Walker in an horrific car crash. The tasteless Tweets are replying by asking questions like ‘I wonder if he had insurance?’ with a link to the car insurance comparison company’s website.

Can you imagine the absolute insanity of whatever marketing and advertising bigwig thought that such an advert campaign would be considered a good idea? It’s absolutely disgusting on so many levels I can’t even begin to comprehend it. Bravo, you nameless insurance company, for capitalising on the tragic death of a movie star in a way that would make even the Daily Mail blush!

Of course not every campaign is so heavy-handed and outright offensive. There’s a god counterpoint to all this horror, and that’s how insurance providers in the UK have been pushing hard for the adoption of new legislation to make British roads safer, especially for younger Brits.

Yes, it’s true that there’s some self-interest here, as the more accidents that occur in the UK the more these insurers would have to pay out to injured victims, but with new information coming to light that 25 per cent of Brits have been involved in some sort of an accident, this figure is just too high – and insurers are justified in reducing the number of car crashes that occur on motorways in the UK.

Notice the difference, though – there’s no crass commercialisaiton here, is there? What a pleasant change from riding the coattails of a flaming wreck of a car where two men tragically lost their lives. And yes, I’m sure that vehicle was insured, you smug bastards.

Who do you trust when insurers work to defraud customers?

Posted on by News Desk

Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 6 Dec 2013:

So I’m not going to sit here and say that customers never defraud car and van insurance companies, but when insurers try to trick customers? Game over, man.

So yes, I’ll readily admit that it’s not a surprise at all that London police broke up a car insurance fraud ring recently. I didn’t even bat an eye when I found up that cars worth nearly £1 million were confiscated either, as it’s sad but true that the kind of highly organised fraud involving car hire firms and invalid fleet insurance is something that happens quite often. I am a bit surprised that these bastards got caught, but I’m also glad to know that they’re finally off the street inflating insurance costs for everyone.

However, what did grab my attention this week is was a story out of Northern Ireland where it seems that large-scale insurance companies might be trying to get one over on their customers by trying the whole bait and switch when it comes to repairing damaged vehicles. Reports are rolling in that some garage mechanics have been approached clandestinely by major insurers like Axa and asked if they wouldn’t mind replacing a piece of damaged car or van equipment with a cheaper – and lower-quality – replica part without telling the customer.

Now naturally any mechanic that’s worth his salt would tell an insurer asking them this to jog on, and that’s exactly what’s happening, though mechanics are being polite about it. Usually they’ll say ‘oh I’d be happy to, let me just check with the owner first,’ and then the insurer says, ‘oh, never mind then’ and slinks off somewhere, presumably to twirl its long, rakish mustache in the dark.

What’s the big deal about replica parts? Well it’s common knowledge that they’re much cheaper than an replacement part manufactured by the vehicle’s original equipment manufacturer, but it’s also a widely held belief that replica parts are often absolute rubbish. Insurers are simply trying to save money in any way they can – something I can appreciate – but trying to do it without their customers finding out is absolutely infuriating. Well, hopefully dragging these wriggling worms out into the light of day like this will prevent the behaviour from recurring in the future, but I wouldn’t hold my breath – would you?

Can you trust comparison sites?

Posted on by News Desk

Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 29 Nov 2013:

If you’re looking for a deal on your van insurance or car insurance, comparison websites are the way to go – or are they?

Well, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, there could be evidence out there that comparison sites are taking us all for a ride. To that end the FCA is going to conduct a thorough investigation into the sector, making sure that we’re not being taken advantage of by the insurance industry.

Is it just me or is the FCA completely missing the point? We’re already being taken advantage of by insurers – that’s exactly why we use comparison sites to try to reclaim some of our independence! Comparison sites allow us to hold up all these awful, overpriced deals from all sorts of insurers; whether you’re looking for commercial van insurance or you’re trying to find good home insurance cover, there’s a comparison site out there that can aid you in picking the best option out of even the worst choices.

It’s not a perfect arrangement, and sure there could be comparison sites out there looking to pull the wool over the eyes of their customers, but it’s go with the devil you know instead of risking the unknown. Besides, insurance comparison sites do more good than harm, especially at times of the year like now when winter is approaching, according to a new report released by Asda Money.

The report urged drivers to winterise their vehicles before the weather turns absolutely horrid, and it’s a good idea to get those winter weather tyres fitted now rather than when there’s already a foot and a half of snow on the ground. The report also pointed out how it can be helpful to check your insurance cover to see if it offers breakdown cover – something that you usually have to get from an organisation like the AA or the RAC otherwise.

Having cover like that included in your policy means not having to pay out of pocket for additional cover through a motoring organisation. It saves you money. It’s a good thing. And using a comparison site will make it easy to choose an insurer that offers breakdown cover. So get off the industry’s back, already, FCA; you’re not doing anyone any favours.

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