Advice on car crash & insurance liability.

MrsE_2

lawrie28 wrote: »

Legally, you are entitled to copies of any CCTV that you are on. You have to send a letter wiht a £10 (i beleive) fee to cover costs. Mark Thomas Comedy Product did a feature about making a film from being on cctv. You give them dates and times etc.

Also, ask the insurance company to visit the scene, or go and take some photos yourself to show the layout of the road. You can also ring up her insurance co yourself and ask them, you could have chosen to sort this yourself, so you are entitled to.

Also if you have the ladies contact number, ring/write to her and ask her to confirm what has happened. Most people will help to sort things, but if her insurers are crap, they may not have asked her for the claim form yet....

Brillant, thats just the sort of MSE help I was after:beer::beer:

Thank you.

MrsE_2

sarahg1969 wrote: »

From what you've said, OP, the other driver's insurers haven't dispute liability at all? They've just failed to deal with any correspondence.

If your daughter has legal cover, it might be useful to use that, and instruct some solicitors to deal with your daughter's claim, to put some pressure on the other driver's insurers. They are probably just slacking, rather than dithering about liability.

Perhaps you are right.

I'm assuming the slacking is to "not admit" liability & I just wanted to be ready with some CCTV footage incase thats what they come back with.

It took the other party weeks to even inform her insurers:rolleyes:

My DDs car is fixed now, but she wants to get it sorted before her insurance next year & get her £300 excess back, she will get the excess back when the other party admits liability won't she?

iamana1ias

lawrie28 wrote: »

Legally, you are entitled to copies of any CCTV that you are on. You have to send a letter wiht a £10 (i beleive) fee to cover costs. Mark Thomas Comedy Product did a feature about making a film from being on cctv. You give them dates and times etc.

Actually that's not quite true. You're entitled under the data protection act to any footage of you, and a subject access request and £10 fee will get you that. What you are not entitled to is footage of anyone else, so they can actually cut the rest out or refuse to provide footage to an individual if there are other people on film.

Might be interesting to see your daughter's actions immediately prior to the accident though

Quentin

MrsE wrote: »

My DDs car is fixed now, but she wants to get it sorted before her insurance next year & get her £300 excess back, she will get the excess back when the other party admits liability won't she?

Not automatically.

You need to pursue the third party for your excess and any other uninsured losses you have incurred. If you have uninsured loss recovery legal expenses as an extra to your insurance policy, then get them to pursue this for you, otherwise it's down to you to do it yourself or get your own solicitor/claim handler to do it for you.

hundredk

iamana1ias wrote: »

I'm not new - the username should have told you that

You need an alias to offer a controversial opinion?

hundredk

iamana1ias wrote: »

Actually that's not quite true. You're entitled under the data protection act to any footage of you, and a subject access request and £10 fee will get you that. What you are not entitled to is footage of anyone else, so they can actually cut the rest out or refuse to provide footage to an individual if there are other people on film.

Might be interesting to see your daughter's actions immediately prior to the accident though

Actually that's not quite true. What the £10 entitles you to is for the holders of the footage to carry out an initial review of what may be available. Depending on the circumstances, that review may determine several things including, but not limited to:

1) there is no relevant footage available
2) there is footage available that cannot be released because of identifying others
3) there is footage available that can be edited to obscure the identity of others
4) there may be footage but due to amount of time required to search eg long and unspecified periods/locations the £10 review does not cover such an exhuastive search

Following the initial review you could be told that footage is available and be expected to pay costs to retrieve, back up, edit, watermark and all associated admin and media costs to obtain the footage. Providers of the footage do not offer a judgement regarding the content or its usefulness and you shouldn't be told at this stage what the footage does or does not reveal, so basically you could end up paying for footage that reveals nothing of use.

You also have to have a valid reason for requesting the footage; ie you cannot say I was in xxx shopping centre at yyy time, give me all footage with me on because I was there and it's my right. However if you were attacked and made the same request that may be valid enough reason. Of course any costs incurred in recovering footage that does prove relevant in a claim can be recovered as part of the claim.

Back to Mrs E's situation, it is the insurance that make the call re 50/50 (knock for knock) and they do this to minimise costs - it is very often cheaper to agree 50/50 than slug it out which would most likely in their opinion cost more in fees than the value of the claim. You may be able to request footage yourself subject to RIPA and some/all points above, go to court, prove liability and then reclaim lost NCB and costs off your DD insurance but the cost of this to you would be prohibitive as indeed it was for insurance company in he first place. I would think the insurance have paid up by now and even if you went through and did all this they would probably not seek to recover their loss from other insurance because they have already agreed.

It is a fact of life with insurance that sometimes you "know" you are not at fault but have to accept they make commercial decisions.