Not at fault but "at fault"! The BARE-FACED CHEEK of insurers

takman · 31 August 2017 at 9:57AM

dactel wrote: »

Thanks everyone for the feedback here. Although I am willing to 'move-on' can't help but think I (along with thousands of others) are the victim of a scam.

I am looking at renewal with another company. One of the questions asks about this claim, "Was the driver at fault"? A 'Yes' or a 'No' makes a £130 difference to my premium. I am entitled to the normal everday interpretation of the word 'fault' surely. Would appreciate comments on this.

Insurance companies aren't very interested in the fact that it wasn't your "fault", what they care about is whether or not the costs were recovered from a third party.

If you didn't want to be at fault then you could have chosen to get the car repaired yourself. But you chose to claim knowing that the costs wouldn't be recovered, so this makes you a higher risk in the future.

ThePants999 · 31 August 2017 at 8:23PM

paddyandstumpy wrote: »

You're confusing blame and 'fault'.

That's because, in English, they're the same thing!

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/at-fault

at fault
phrase
If someone or something is at fault, they are to blame or are responsible for a particular situation that has gone wrong.

Only in insurance-speak do they have different meanings, which is stupid of the insurance industry IMO.

tempus_fugit · 31 August 2017 at 11:18PM

Clifford_Pope wrote: »

I'm not arguing with the definitions and their meanings, but I do wonder why insurance companies don't change their wording in order to improve their public estimation.
The general public has a pretty poor regard to the honesty of insurance companies, and this misuse of the ordinary usage of the word "fault" is one that particularly rankles.
Why don't insurance companies care what the public thinks of them? All other organisations go to great pains to try to simply their technical language and to allay public mistrust.

I agree, it's quite a misleading term to use. When I worked in insurance, about 20-30 years ago, we would not have called this a "fault" claim, we would have just called it a claim and because the costs could not be recovered the insured would lose some or all of their NCD. We would not have implied that they were themselves at fault in any way. I sometimes think that these terms have become common because they have been coined by people who have a poor grasp of the English language, for whatever reason that may be.

csgohan4 · 1 September 2017 at 6:39AM

what ever the OP wants to call it, they will probably paying back the money they got for fixing their car through premiums hike and more

Sea_Shell · 1 September 2017 at 7:35AM

I had a true non-fault claim, and had recovered my excess, so at renewal I put non-fault claim on the application.

Insurers then rang me to query this answer, as it didn't match the insurers database, as the claim hadn't been fully settled off and was still showing as FAULT.

After a bit of ringing around and chivvying along, I was able to get the TP insurers to update their records and the database, which satisfied my new insurers.

So if you say NO to having made a "fault" claim, then they will rumble you.

I agree that FAULT is maybe the wrong word for them to use....but " a loss for which you have made a claim but unable to make a recovery" is a bit long winded!

prowla · 1 September 2017 at 7:42AM

There is no fault in the OP's incident, by any reasonable real-world definition of the word "fault"; they were driving along a road as normal and something flew through the air and hit their car.

The insurer using the term "at fault" is just playing the game.

paddyandstumpy · 1 September 2017 at 8:08AM

Their not 'playing the game', they have paid out and not recovered their loss, which makes the claim a 'fault' claim!

Aretnap · 1 September 2017 at 9:52AM

dactel wrote: »

Thanks everyone for the feedback here. Although I am willing to 'move-on' can't help but think I (along with thousands of others) are the victim of a scam.

It's not a scam - it's just a way of classifying claims. There's a certain logic to classifying them according to whether your insurer made recovery from someone else rather than according to "blame". Blame is a somewhat nebulous and subjective concept - two people can have very different opinions on who was to blame for an accident, but whether or not your insurer made recovery from the other side is an objective fact, which is easily checked.

If you don't like this rather binary approach and would prefer something that takes the specific circumstances of your own accident into account then there are options available. You could go to Lloyds of London, sit down for tea and biscuits with your underwriter, chat to him in detail about your accident and see whether he thinks that it marks you out as a higher risk. However you would inevitably have to pay extra for that sort of bespoke service - probably a lot more than the £130 that your insurer's computer wants to charge you - so in practice nobody does it.

I am looking at renewal with another company. One of the questions asks about this claim, "Was the driver at fault"? A 'Yes' or a 'No' makes a £130 difference to my premium. I am entitled to the normal everday interpretation of the word 'fault' surely. Would appreciate comments on this.

I don't actually think that's an absurd argument, and I do agree that the use of the term "fault" is potentially misleading, and insurers should clarify what they mean by it rather than expecting consumers to understand industry jargon. However given that the consequences of a declined claim can be devastating, it's not an argument that I'd want to (literally) bet my house on for the sake of £130. Especially as in your case you evidently know what the jargon means, so can't honestly claim to have actually been confused by it.

Not at fault but "at fault"! The BARE-FACED CHEEK of insurers

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