Premium increase by how much after no fault car accident? (NCD protected)

angelfire

Hi All,

Before we ring our insurance company, I wondered if anyone could give us some advice please?

Last night my partner had an accident in the car. A fox ran out into the road in front of him on a motorway slip road, as he was gathering speed. Poor little thing stood no chance - my partner said it all happened too quick for him to swerve and even if he had, it would have then become an incident involving other vehicles, so he had no choice but to plough straight through it.

We are of course, so thankful that it wasn't anything worse and that he and no other drivers/passengers were hurt, but the car needs some repair!

It is a performance car and so sits quite low, the front bumper and tray have more or less gone and we can see cracking underneath as well. The front number plate has gone and the radiator is a tiny bit dented on one side.

As he was on the motorway slip road, he couldn't stop immediately to asess any damage, but the car is driving okay and doesn't seem to have any mechanical issues. We have reported the incident to the police, and of course there's no blame or anything and they have sent a car out to clear up any debris.

Our issue is whether or not to claim on our insurance. Our premium was on the high side anyway due to the type of car it is, but we have 5 years protected no claims and neither of us have made a claim before.

We are concerned though that if we claim for this, our premium will rocket next year. Has anyone any experience of this sort of thing? We are not 'young' drivers - 32 and 33 years of age, but the car is a focus ST, which is already quite expensive to insure. Having said that, we would not want to scrimp on the repairs as we look after it and drive with care and attention, he was just ince=redibly unlucky last night - as was foxy woxy!

all help appreciated....

:beer:

Oscar_The_Grouch

Hi there

Your NCD is protected, so the premium should not go up, but if you want to make sure:

1. Go into a price comparison site and enter your details as if your insurance were due next week. Do not put in the accident.
2. Note down the top 5 prices and who the quotes are from
3. Go back in and enter the accident details with a total cost of £2,000 for the repairs
4. Note down the top 5 prices and who the quotes are from

This should give you a good indication of what, if anything, will happen to the premium.

angelfire

Oscar_The_Grouch wrote: »

Hi there

Your NCD is protected, so the premium should not go up, but if you want to make sure:

1. Go into a price comparison site and enter your details as if your insurance were due next week. Do not put in the accident.
2. Note down the top 5 prices and who the quotes are from
3. Go back in and enter the accident details with a total cost of £2,000 for the repairs
4. Note down the top 5 prices and who the quotes are from

This should give you a good indication of what, if anything, will happen to the premium.

Many thanks for your reply I will try this out...:beer:

JonBoy_SCFC

Oscar_The_Grouch wrote: »

Hi there

Your NCD is protected, so the premium should not go up, but if you want to make sure:

1. Go into a price comparison site and enter your details as if your insurance were due next week. Do not put in the accident.
2. Note down the top 5 prices and who the quotes are from
3. Go back in and enter the accident details with a total cost of £2,000 for the repairs
4. Note down the top 5 prices and who the quotes are from

This should give you a good indication of what, if anything, will happen to the premium.

from my experience, protecting your NCD simply means you keep your number of NCD years, but makes no protection against price. thye sell you NCD under the illusion that you won't suffer price increases if there's an accident but they set their price based on the claims history more than the NCD anyway

Bit of a con really but that's how it works

TighterThanTwoCoatsOfPain

as above, my understanding is that protecting your NCD simply gives you the comfort that you will receive x% or x Years discount from the headline premium... you have a claim for any reason, the headline is higher so I would say you will pay an increased premium next year after your protected discount.

raskazz

JonBoy_SCFC wrote: »

thye sell you NCD under the illusion that you won't suffer price increases if there's an accident but they set their price based on the claims history more than the NCD anyway

Care to back this up with evidence? I've never heard any insurer promise or imply that protected no claims discount does anything other than "what it says in the tin".

shelly

I would expect your renewal will increase but shop around and you might be surprised.

I had a 100% fault claim in 2006. Had a row with a metal post which scraped the car from front to back down the passenger side.
Our renewal rocketed (as we expected) but I shopped around and we got a better quote from another co. We paid less after the claim than we had before the claim and have continued to do so.

Maybe we got lucky finding cheaper premiums after a claim but shopping around at renewal doesn't take long.


Oscar is wrong when he said **Your NCD is protected, so the premium should not go up**

This is not what NCB protection does. As John and Tighter says it purely protects the amount of NCB you have to apply to a premium after a claim. The premium may go up, and most likely will from your current insurer but your NCB stays the same.

Oscar_The_Grouch

shelly wrote: »

Oscar is wrong when he said **Your NCD is protected, so the premium should not go up**

Ok, so we are all entitled to our opinion.

Here's the long version:

All motor insurance premium starts from the same basic figure. For the purpose of this example, we will set that figure at £100.

From there, the Underwriter (or Actuary) allocates point increases (young driver, sporty car, 15 fault accidents in 3 years) and decreases (over 50 but under 65, female if under 40, male if over 45, driving a Kia) depending on the risk presented. The underwriter accepts that the average person will have 1 accident every 10 to 11 years and rates on this too.

In the circumstances of OP, the car results in an increase from the £100 basic, as do their ages (although not by as much as if they were 10 years younger). Let's say that their rating factors result in a tenfold increase so the gross premium is £1,000.

To this figure, you apply the NCD entitlement and then add in IPT. If the NCD has a ceiling of 60%, the premium will be (1,000 x 40%) £400 plus IPT.

An Underwriter who is looking to increase their book of business will not consider 1 accident to be a rating factor, regardless of fault. 2 or more, regardless of fault, could have an effect.

The other point is that having a single accident, regardless of fault, will not affect the basic premium (the £100 mentioned above) that all policies start from. If the underwriter drops the basic premium to £90, then based on the 10 times increase and 60% NCD, the premium would actually drop to £360 plus IPT.

Here endeth "Basic Underwriting Practices" lesson 1.

raskazz

Oscar_The_Grouch wrote: »

An Underwriter who is looking to increase their book of business will not consider 1 accident to be a rating factor, regardless of fault. 2 or more, regardless of fault, could have an effect.

I have worked for one insurer which does use a single recent non-fault claim to rate the premium, and I have seen the figures to back it up, which were obtained over at least five years and from a book of several hundred thousand policyholders. In fact, I noted down some of the most salient figures the last time I accessed the stats. I'll post some on here tomorrow if I can find them again.

I know of quite a few other private motor insurers who follow suit.

Being an underwriter, I'd also take issue with some of the rest of the post (eg all premiums starting from the same base figure - this is not often the case, usually the base premium is taken from a matrix of vehicle groups/areas/sometimes driver ages - this can help eliminate multicollinearity), but I think I'd bore everyone to death if I expanded on it.

Oscar_The_Grouch

raskazz wrote: »

I have worked for one insurer which does use a single recent non-fault claim to rate the premium, and I have seen the figures to back it up, which were obtained over at least five years and from a book of several hundred thousand policyholders. In fact, I noted down some of the most salient figures the last time I accessed the stats. I'll post some on here tomorrow if I can find them again.

I know of quite a few other private motor insurers who follow suit.

Thanks Raskazz - As usual, I'm happy to defer to your expert knowledge on this. From personal experience, my premium has NOT gone up as a result of a single fault accident (used the price comparison check above to make sure), but that could be due to many other rating factors.

Being an underwriter, I'd also take issue with some of the rest of the post (eg all premiums starting from the same base figure - this is not often the case, usually the base premium is taken from a matrix of vehicle groups/areas/sometimes driver ages - this can help eliminate multicollinearity), but I think I'd bore everyone to death if I expanded on it.

Errm.. on this one we will have to agree to differ, as different companies look at it different ways - I know of many companies that work on a matrix backing down to one single figure per policy type. I do agree that it's too complex to go into here, hence my "here endeth the lesson" quip!

Quote

JonBoy_SCFC wrote: »

Bit of a con really but that's how it works

How is it a con, exactly?