No fault treated as fault because don't know who hit car

Mamissimo

My daughter's car was hit and damaged when parked in a gym carpark. There was no witness and no CCTV. The damage was several hundred pounds worth. Having explored every avenue to find a witness she did the right thing and reported it to her insurers.

#KwikFit completed the (no fault) claim quickly and then told her that although she had fully comp, protected no claims etc they were treating it as at fault because "they had no one to reclaim the cost from) and thus were increasing her premium by 45% instantly - half way though the annual contract.

As she had already paid the excess this increase of over £200 meant that in effect she paid for the repair.

#KwikFit say this is standard practice - has anyone else experience this kind of no fault swindle?

OnanTheBarbarian

"fault" does not mean blame.

It is chalked up as a fault claim as a claim is made on the policy and the insurer is left with an outlay they can not recover from anyone as the identity of the culprit is not known.

Seems strange they would increase the premium for the remainder of the policy term though, maybe their terms & conditions allow them to do this, I assume this is for insuring the same car etc?

Aretnap

Indeed, insurers use "fault" in a special (some would say misleading) sense which has nothing to do with "blame", but whether they can recover the money they spend repairing their car from someone else. In a normal accident this does usually roughly correspond to blameworthiness, but where there's nobody else to claim from (eg because the other driver scampered and can't be traced, or your car was stolen by persons unknown), or where nobody in particular is to blame (eg because a storm blows a tree over onto your car), it means it goes down as a fault claim.

Increasing the premium mid-term is unusual though. On a quick skim of Kwik Fit's policy documents they do list (page 8) some mid term changes which might result in an increased premium - and an accident isn't one of them. Perhaps you could ask them to specify the term which allows them to do this.