Continue with insurance claim after accident or cancel?

Tinseltown

Hi I really need some advice. It's abit long but will try to keep it short. In September I was stopped at a junction waiting to pull out when another driver went into the back of me. We swapped details and he said his insurance will sort it. The first company I got put to told me it was a total loss but couldn't contact his insurance so passed it into my underwriters. By this time I also found out he was driving a friends car but was insured on his own insurance to drive it. My underwriters told me yesterday that his insurance company won't accept liability as he is under 25. They and I have tried contacting the bloke but he is not answering any messages/calls/letters. The only option would be to claim on my own insurance but it will affect my no claims bonus (currently have 5 years) and I will have to pay £200 excess. The car is a peugeot 106 year 98 so it's old (hence why the first company wrote it off!) so is it actually worth all of this or am I better off cancelling it all, scrapping the car for what I can and cut my losses?! Thanks in advance

Aretnap

Realistically a 16 year old Peugot 106 is only going to be worth a few hundred quid - I'm seeing them advertised on Auto Trader for £500, and I'd be willing to bet that the insurer's valuation will be lower than that.

Whether it's worth claiming on your own policy depends on how much the claim would put your premium up by over the next 3-5 years, but unless your insurance is incredibly cheap to begin with it's very likely indeed that it would end up costing you more. In fact with an excess of £200, you might well end up with no more than the £100ish you could scrap it for anyway - and lose 2 years worth of NCD for your trouble.

If I understand correctly he claimed that he was insured under his own policy on his driving other cars cover - but actually he wasn't? If so have you checked whether there was any policy on the car itself? (If you don't know you can find out here for a nominal fee) If so, the Road Traffic Act makes the insurers of the vehicle liable for the claim in the absence of any other valid policy, so you could try approaching them directly and see if they'll deal with it. If the insurers won't just pay up there are ways of forcing them to do so, but they're quite long winded and involve tracking down the little !!!!!!, so you have to ask yourself just how much effort is it worth putting in for the sake of a couple of hundred pounds.

Ectophile

As Aretnap says, if the friend who owned the car had an insurance policy on the car, then you can go after that insurance company for the money, even though the friend wasn't driving it at the time.

If the friend is unlucky, they may find their insurance company suing them for the cost later on, but that's not your problem, and it may persuade them not to lend their car to an uninsured driver in future.