Reducing car insurance - car valuation & licence issues

lisyloo

You said £700 of damage in your post so a wheel repair for £80 is only a fraction of the total repair necessary.

Ok, that's not clear.
£80 was the complete repair but there was some difference of opinion about the "repair necessary". A new wheel was £700, repair to straighten existing wheel was £80.
I went for the cheaper option in the end and paid for it myself but along the way I did consider an insurance claim (and also a council claim) when weighing up my options.

Was it a motorbike that you had the incident on? Reason I ask is because £40 for a tyre repair is robbery if it's a car.

Yes it was a motorcycle tyre. It is a little on the high side, but it was done on a weekend at shore notice, so I'm ok with that. I would rather get it done at a good garage that I trust and won't cut corners or rip me off (by insisting I bought a new tyre).

but that's not what the insurance company means when it asks the question

So what do they mean?
A nail in a tyre is an occupational hazard like stone chips and therefore a fairly normal occurence every now and again.
A bent wheel is admittedly less usual, but bits do get bent on bikes now and again and generally people wouldn't declare low cost items like levers, foot pegs, mirrors, indicators etc.
Would appreciate your thoughts on this.

If I may ask, how did you do this calculation?

Yes sure.
You can use an search engine e.g. confused.com or your own insurers site (if you expect to stay with them).
Get a quote as you would normally then edit the details and increase the claims and decrease the NCD (if not protected).
You can then see the difference between the quotes.
You can then approximate this for 3 years by multiplying the uplift by 3.
Note this is an assumption that your uplift is the same for 3 years, but it's the best you can do under the circumstances.
Then repeat for the car policy (I have both bike and car).
Note this will apply on any motoring polcies, so if you are named driver on someone else's car then there's an uplift there too.
Add together the increases in premiums plus the excess.

Note that you are making assumptions about the uplift in future.
Also note that it would affect future uplifts if you have more claims.
So the danger for me of going from 1 to 2 claims, is that if I had a third where perhaps I didn't have a choice about claiming (becasue the cost is too high) then I'm really going to get stung.

I don't think my uplift was huge, but I have to multiply it by 9 (or 12 if I get myself a car) and that's the problem for me.
We have one car and two bikes at home and in future it's possible I might get a car (if for example I got a job where I need my own car).