Advice about unpaid third party insurance claim

JournalGirl

Summary:

OH was in a car accident, not his fault, car was written off

His insurance company provided a hire car until the claim was settled (around two weeks)

Several years later he has received a letter from a law firm saying that the third party insurance company has not settled the claim for car hire and they need his authority to act on his behalf and recover the outstanding charges

They also say that this will not result in them requesting payment from him 'as long as he does not fail to co-operate or provide misleading information'

The also ask if he wishes to claim for a personal injury.

They want him to fill in a form (did he need the car, did he have funds to hire one from the high street, how many cars in the house, could he have borrowed a car.)

My gut feeling is to ignore them, they smell like ambulance chasers to me, but can they pursue us if we do not 'co-operate'?

Any advice appreciated

Quentin

If they are acting on behalf of the organisation that arranged the hire car then you should comply with their requests.


You will have agreed to when originally taking the hire car, and failure to do so now will be a breach of the agreement, meaning if they don't get paid they can turn their sights on you to reimburse them

Enterprise_1701C

I would contact the insurance company he was with at the time and find out what it is about.

What normally happens (or at least used to) is that the insurance company you are with settles everything then makes a claim on the third party insurance company. If the insurance company was having trouble getting the money off them then it would be them trying to recover it, it should not be anything to do with him.

Do not ignore it, if it was me I would definitely ask the insurance company.

Also check out the name of the law firm, could be ambulance chasers.

Just seems a bit strange to me.

JournalGirl

thanks both for your replies

Enterprise - that's what I thought. I don't understand why we are involved. And I also worry that if we say we could have paid for the hire car ourselves (we were not asked to do so, we were offered the replacement by them) we may somehow be accepting liability.

Ive googled the names involved - it's not the insurance company who hasn't been paid - it's a claims handling company - does that make any difference?

Aretnap

In a no fault accident it's quite common for your insurance company to pass you on to a claims handling company rather thank Ealing with your claim themselves - it means they don't have to handover any of their own money, even temporarily, and they get a nice little kickback from the claims handling company to boot. Often the customer is not fully aware of precisely who is providing the hire car or arranging the repairs - though it was probably detailed in the very small print of a document he signed when he picked up the hire car. The same document will also have included clause by which he agreed that he'd assist the claims hire company if needed when it came to recovering the costs of the hire car.

just fill in the form, answering the questions honestly. So long as you do that, there should be no comeback.

JournalGirl

thanks Aretnap

captainawsome

I'm in the same situation from a non fault accident in February. The claims handlers are taking action to recover the hite car fee and MAY need my cooperation to do this, up to now no forms have been sent out but this might change in the future depending on how it goes.

To be honest I have no problem complying fully to help them recover what they need, as long as they don't want me to pay for the car hire I don't mind!

JournalGirl

thanks Captain Awesome. I think part of my issue is that it's four years later, not a few months. It's going to be difficult to answer the questions as it's so long ago. They want things like a copy of the V5 of a car scrapped 4 years ago....

I guess I'm just nervous that we will be stuck with a bill at this late stage

captainawsome

I'm nervous of being landed with the bill myself which is why I will comply as much as I can. They can't expect a v5 for a scrapped car that long ago, not sure why they would even need the v5 TBH

oscarward

when the car was written off by the insurers/claims handlers they would have asked for the V5 so they could send to DVLA as written off and the Category. That's what happened in my case anyway.


They also asked for my assistance in recovering the hire costs, it was settled a few days before the court hearing.


I think court action is used as a negotiating tactic sometimes.