Car insurance postcode lottery

thejbster

Hi everyone,

First of all apologies if you've seen this under the main car insurance thread - I'm a newbie and it took me awhile to work out how to post to a new thread rather than reply. Anyway hope someone can help...

I've just done a comparison search on moneysupermarket for car insurance renewal and got a cheapest quote of £454 which is about £100 better than my renewal offer. However I noticed that the site still had my old address (which is 0.5 miles away) - when I changed to the correct address the best quote was for £630, and the company that had quoted £454 went up to £1006! As a check I rang the company and they said it is completely up to their underwriters and there was nothing they could do about it as the post code is different (the first 4 characters are the same but the last two are different).

As a second experiment I tried using the post code of the house directly across the road from me and the cheapest quote came in at £511.

I've got an excellent credit history and have checked my report recently online which is fine so I think it can only be due to the postcode of my property. Does anyone know if there is anyway to get these things reassessed?

Yours confused...

thejbster

Quentin

As long as you have done your shopping around properly then nothing you can do to get them to rate your address differently.

If you are doing multiple quotes with false address details then make sure they are anonymous!

InsideInsurance

There is no way you can force your insurers to re-run their analysis to reprice the postcodes.

How postcodes work mean that there is no practical way of an insurer knowing what postcodes border what other postcodes when you consider the sheer volume of postcodes that exist. You can get an approximate idea by the earlier parts of the postcodes but even these arent always consistent.

Insurers simply use very large computers to analyse their book of business and claims experiences etc and it comes out with a relative rating of claims exposures based on postcodes when you strip out all other factors. It can therefore mean if there is a spate of issues involving a couple of people on one side of the road then all that side that shares one postcode will get higher premiums than the otherside of the road with a different postcode