The UK Insurance Blog

If you’ve read any of my earlier blog posts or you’ve taken a look at the insurance web site you will have seen my advice to shop around for insurance and not take the easy way out by renewing with your current insurer.

So a couple of weeks back I received my car insurance renewal from Tesco. It’s paid by direct debit, so the easy way out is to do nothing and let it carry on. Struck by a feeling of guilt at contemplating renewal with Tesco, I did the honourable thing and got online quotes from some other insurers.

I’ve been with Tesco for a few years now, when I took out the policy they were ultra-competitive and I couldn’t see any reason why this would have changed. The renewal quote of £315.00 for fully comp insurance, £55.65 for my protected no-claims bonus and £95.55 for breakdown insurance all looked reasonable to me, giving a grand total of £466.20.

You can imagine my surprise when a quote from More Th>n came to £298.60 for exactly the same options. I don’t have the figures to hand but each of the three components was cheaper and even the cost of spreading the payments over the year was charged at 13.7% APR rather than the 23.6% APR charged by Tesco.

The regular advice is to compare the policy options between the providers in order to confirm that you’re comparing like with like and I’ve done that. The other advice often handed out is that you should take into account the service offered by the various companies. Trouble was that I’d never claimed either on the motor insurance or the breakdown insurance, so how was I to know how I’d have been treated ?.

The change from Tesco to More Th>n was very simple, I only had to give my Tesco policy number for them to confirm my no-claim discount and that was that. I saved over 30% on what I considered to be a competitive car insurance policy by simply getting a few more quotes.

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There’s an article on the Sky News website discussing an AA report on the increase in uninsured drivers. It seems that the total number of cars seized by the police because of no insurance rose from 78,000 in 2006 to 150,000 in 2007, with 40% of cars seized not reclaimed.

Maybe, just maybe the police with their car mounted cameras are winning the battle but there still seems to be big loopholes for the criminals to avoid buying insurance. Apart from the ‘Chancers’ who just hope that they don’t get caught, there are at least two other common groups.

The first are the people that either don’t register their vehicle, or register it at a fictitious address. These people get away with thousands of pounds worth of parking fines and congestion charge payments but they won’t gat away with driving without insurance if they get caught by a police camera car.

It seems that another dodge is to put foreign number plates on your car. The police computer doesn’t keep a record of foreign registered vehicles in use on UK roads, so people driving on foreign plates are not likely to be caught. Next time you see a right hand drive car with foreign plates ask yourself how that could happen, since we’re about the only country left that drives on the “proper” side of the road. Let’s hope that the police have a similar thought and hopefully a swift purge will sort out a few of these criminals.

I came across an interesting piece in the Burnham & Highbridge Weekly News where the MD of the insurance comparison website confused.com was quoted as saying

“It is important not to confuse being savvy with being dishonest. Job titles do provide a grey area where the quotes can be ‘massaged’ or legitimately exploited by the consumer, but most other areas of quote criteria are a great deal more rigid and should not be manipulated in the same way.”

She was referring to the discrepancies in car insurance premium depending on someone’s job title. The examples included someone with a job of “bricklayer” pays 17% less than a “builder”, a “TV announcer” pays 18% less than a “broadcaster” and a “journalist” would pay 33% less than a “news reporter”.

The moral of the story is to get a few different quotes using variations on your job title and provided that you’re not actually fibbing then go with the cheapest.

Further to my piece a couple of days ago, I’ve just been reading some information from the Manchester Police saying that uninsured drivers are six times more likely to have convictions for driving un-roadworthy vehicles and nine times more likely to have convictions for drink-driving.

And their crimes are said to put an extra £30 on every car insurance premium.

The latest technology fitted to lots of police cars ensures that vehicles not registered on the database system (it checks insurance, road tax, driving license and MOT) automatically trigger an alert to officers who, under the new powers, can seize cars. - That’s Good !

Drivers unable to produce proof of insurance have their vehicles impounded.

To reclaim their vehicles, owners must pay £105 for recovery, £12 a day storage, and a £200 fixed penalty notice or a fine imposed by a court. - That’s Bad !.

So for around £350 they can retrieve their cars and be driving around uninsured again, because it’s a certain fact that they won’t be wanting to pay the insurance premium that’s demanded following their conviction for “no insurance”, drunk driving etc.

If an owner fails to reclaim the vehicle within 14 days, it is crushed, scrapped or sold. - Ha…there’s the answer then. Lock ‘em all up for 15 days when you seize the car. When they get out and pay their fine present them with the block of crushed metal - Oh I like it!.

I’ve just been reading an article on the Huddersfield Daily Examiner that claims that one in five of the vehicles driving around their area is uninsured. Incredibly, it then goes on to claim that in the BD3 district of Bradford an unbelievable 57% of vehicles is uninsured.

Now I don’t know if their figures are accurate, they come from The West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Authority, which is a public body comprising 22 councillors from the areas around Leeds & Bradford. With their stated aim being “To be the driving force co-ordinating the provision and development of high-quality public transport services for everybody within West Yorkshire”, they’ve certainly got an agenda to disuade people from using their cars but I would still imagine that they wouldn’t come out with such statistics if they weren’t accurate.

What’s mystifying me is that when I watch “Road Wars” on Sky telly, the police cars are all equipped with fancy cameras that read number plates and then check with databases somewhere to ensure that the vehicle is taxed and insured. Presumably, police cars throughout the country are equipped with the same high tech equipment so why are so many people being allowed to drive around uninsured?.

I’ve seen the Sky TV cops seize and crush a car before now, but can’t remember what offense the perpetrators had committed. If the police were to seize and crush every uninsured car being driven on our roads then the country would be a better place to live in. And whilst they’re driving around checking for uninsured vehicles they could enforce another law that’s totally ignored, they could arrest and disqualify people using mobile phones whilst driving !!.

There was a general feeling in the office that residents of Northern Ireland were getting heavily penalised when it came time to renew their motor insurance. Now that peace has returned to the Province and everything has been quiet now for several years, we were wondering if and why the people of Northern Ireland were paying over the odds for their insurance. We decided to do a little experiment to see how much difference your location makes to car insurance premiums.

Meet David Stone (Dave to his friends). He’s a married man born in 1966 with a squeeky clean license, never in trouble with the police and with 5 years no claims discount. He’s just bought a 2005 Ford Focus 1.4 LX for the knock down price of £7,500. He’s a model citizen, well he certainly should be because we invented him a few days ago. He tends to move around the country a bit, but apart from that he’s your absolutely normal, totally fictional guy. Let me explain. We wanted to put identical details into a selection of online car insurance sites to see how big a difference there is in premiums depending on your location. Please try to remember that we’re not comparing premiums between companies, some of them might well be offering extra facilities such as roadside recovery or protected NCD in their prices, all that we are comparing is the difference in price from the same insurer when we move Dave around the country.

Remembering that our original task was to prove that the car drivers of Northern Ireland were being unfairly treated and armed with street maps (kindly provided by Google Maps), we looked around for likely “dodgy” locations.

Not knowing Belfast at all we plumped for Newforge Lane which is a mile or two to the south of Belfast city centre (and probably very plush and not “dodgy” at all, but you’ll understand the “dodgy” reference in a minute).

Our next location was Bold Street in Manchester. It’s in the Moss Side part of the city which gained notoriety across Britain during the 1980s and 1990s due to high crime levels and several riots.

Next we moved Dave to Electric Avenue in Brixton, London. Brixton has long been associated with gun crime, poverty, drugs and violence and is often classed as London’s Compton or Harlem. It has the reputation of being one of the most dangerous places in the UK, with Coldharbour Lane once holding the statistic of 3 shootings per week in the mid-90’s. It is a place any visitor or inhabitant alike, would be wise to not venture around at night.

Our final resting place needs a little explanation. One of the leading UK insurance companies, Endsleigh, did a report on the best and worst cities for motor accidents and car theft. In the report, Belfast is the safest for accidents and Hull is the worst for theft by a considerable margin. So Hull it was to be, in fact Anlaby Road in Hull which looks to be pretty much in the centre of town.

OK, back to the plan. Dave was going to get quotes for comprehensive car insurance from a variety of insurers, each time getting 4 quotes, one for each location. All other details input would be exactly the same for each insurer and for each location. By doing this we should be able to see if car insurance in Northern Ireland has excessively high car insurance premiums.

The results surprised everyone in the office and I think they’ll surprise you. The variance between insurers is amazing and if we learn one thing from this exercise it should be to shop around before parting with your hard earned cash. A bad address to one insurer seems to be treated as perfectly ok by another, there’s no rhyme nor reason for some of the differences. Let’s go ahead and look at some of the results.

We started by trying to get quotes for the Northern Ireland address from our sister site Instant Online Insurance. There are a number of direct insurers on there such as Direct Line that don’t appear on the car insurance comparison websites. The results are in the following table.

Car Insurance Premiums vs Location

Please remember that the object of this exercise was to show the differing rates charged for car insurance depending on where you live. Our original intention was to confirm that people living in Northern Ireland were getting a raw deal on their car insurance premiums. As you will see below, we were probably some way off the mark but what the figures do prove is that it pays to shop around when buying car insurance and that each insurer seems to have their own ideas on which are both the safest and the most dangerous areas in the country.

Direct Insurers

These are the online direct insurers that tend not to appear on comparison websites.

_{Notes
1) Privilege, MORE TH>N and Churchill wouldn’t insure our Northern Ireland resident.
2) Endsleigh don’t seem to have much confidence in their own research, Hull is half the price of Manchester
3) MORE TH>N were a complete pain in the whatsit. Their quote process crashed 3 or 4 times and when we did eventually get to the end they wouldn’t insure us.
4) Since Dave was just about the most perfect virtual motorist we could invent, you’ve got to assume that Privilege, MORE TH>N and Churchill don’t insure anybody in Northern Ireland, in which case why don’t they turn you down as soon as you enter your address. It’s frustrating to get to the end of one of these online car insurance quote forms only to be told “sorry”.
5) Judging by the premiums quoted by the companies willing to offer insurance in Northern Ireland, the risks are no greater than in many parts of England, so let’s hope that a few more insurers will begin to offer car insurance for Northern Ireland residents.}

Car Insurance - Compare The Market

This table is the result of putting 4 different addresses into the quote engine with exactly the same proposer details, only his address is changed each time.

Compare The Market

_{Notes
1) As in the previous table there were a number of companies that wouldn’t quote for Northern Ireland even though they quoted for our other locations. They are at the bottom of the list
2) Royal & Sun Alliance didn’t quote for Hull but it may just have been a server failure rather than their unwillingness to quote.}

So once more we don’t really see a positive sign of discrimination against the people of Northern Ireland and would hope that some of those companies that chose not to quote might be willing to dip their toe in the water before too long.

What was reinforced most strongly was that it’s imperative to shop around for car insurance quotes before committing to a particular insurer. These companies have hugely differing views on safe and unsafe areas and we should take advantage of that by saving lots of money on car insurance premiums.

Our next little survey will involve Bob the Builder and his search for cheap home insurance and soon afterwards Rover the Dog will be imparting some wisdom on pet insurance. In the meantime, if you’d like to tell us about how low or high your insurance premiums are then hit the comment button and drop us a line. Don’t give your full address, just a post code is fine. So if you think that you have the cheapest premiums in the country in your area please let us know. Oh and if you’re insured with Norwich Union please give us the post code, at the moment we have the feeling that with those prices they’re either not looking for motor insurance or perhaps they’re just on a different planet ?.

Ross