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.

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.