The UK Insurance Blog

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