£10 for a police report on a burglary?

GreyQueen

If the Police accept that a crime has taken place, they issue a crime reference number. This should be sufficient proof for an insurance claim - my insurance provider accepted a 2-line letter from the police to myself quoting such a number and confirming they had investigated without success. But the criminal had taken an angle-grinder through two locks to get into my shed, found my pushbike chained to a wall with another lock, left that, and took another bike-chain and padlock which wasn't in use. My losses were modest and I had taken stringent efforts to prevent them happening.

It may be your insurer has issues with how your son was looking after his MacBook and believe he was careless. I live near a uni accomodation block and the silly sausages regularly leave laptops and similar in plain view on their ground floor windowsills with the windows open. They are given a talk before they move in about not doing this, but every year, some do and their valuables are stolen. Drives the police here potty.

I believe insurers are within their rights to refuse to pay out if the insured party has behaved in such a way as to have contributed to the robbery - such as leaving doors unlocked/ windows open when out.

If you are asking for a copy of their investigation notes, you are making a DPA 1998 request and there is a standard £10 fee for this.

ETA just read post 8 - seems your son was very careless with an extremely expensive bit of kit and I'd consider the insurer justified in their decision. Your son can't expect you to fork out another £1500. Tell him to buy a secondhand lappy out of his own money and look after it this time. He's presumably at least 18 and an adult and this is what you call a learning experience; life is tough sometimes.

Spendless

aym280 wrote: »

Did you have any joy? I presume there must have been forced entry. The trouble with my son's case was that the MacBook Pro was fished out of the gap of an open window whilst my son was out.

Yes, insurer paid out though 2 lots ofinsurance excess (house and car) still cost us almost £500.

For the contents, some was paid out as a cash amount and other items were replaced. We only discovered the missing of my Kindle 3-4 weeks later and contacted them thinking they'd refuse but they paid out on that too.

My husband's car was stolen. The burglars got into our house via the back and stole items from our living room before going out through the front door using my set of keys to take the car. It's a company car though and has a tracking system fitted, so it just took 2 phone calls to hubby's employers and then to satellite company to reveal the postcode the car was parked at. The police then went and retrieved it.

It turned out our door to the back garden was faulty, thought the report stated that it wouldn't be evident to us, that it was.

Since being broken into we have had anti-snap locks installed on our doors.

Have you asked your insurance company why they are not accepting the crime ref number? That was all I needed.

Mr_Singleton

aym280 wrote: »

The trouble with my son's case was that the MacBook Pro was fished out of the gap of an open window whilst my son was out.

Yes, a bit of a !!!!!! that.... sometime's people tell us things we don't want to hear but in all fairness it seems completely right and proper that the insurance company has refused the claim.

From what you've now revealed your teenage(?) son went out leaving the window open and an Apple MacBook Pro* in a position to be stolen. Why do you feel that I and every one else that pays for insurance should be forced to pay increased premiums to subsidise other peoples foolishness?

As for the police charging £10.... I'm fine with that as I want the police out there on the beat and investigating crime rather than sitting at desks printing out forms for insurance companies.

* I have to admit that it intrigued me that its a MacBook PRO rather than just a MacBook. 99% of people don't or wouldn't need the "Pro" bit especially as Apple charge an arm and a leg for the very subtle difference. As you said you had to save up for it I'd be interested to know if there was a reason a teenager needed a Pro or if it was just a bit of an expensive "showy off" thing?

I'm typing this on a £2300 Macbook Pro but I know the difference, didn't need to save up for it and need the extra functionality.

Tiddlywinks

aym280 wrote: »

You would think as a victim of burglary for which the Kent police have done nothing, the last thing you want is to part with more money, especially when your claim has already been refused by the insurer.

I feel like a bad mother that I have to tell him off again and again and yet £1500 is not an easy amount to save.

Why is a crime report classed as PDA any way? It is just a trick to make money.

'A trick to make money'? Get real!

£10 will not cover the costs of responding to an application for personal data. There's an awful lot of behind the scenes admin involved in such a request.

You are costing them time and effort in your request.

Kent police did nothing? What do you expect they could do really? Drop everything else like domestic abuse, major crime, people trafficking etc etc etc and redirect the resources to finding your son's stolen laptop? Yeah, that'd go down well with the victims of more serious crime.

You come across as rude and aggressive - your anger should be directed at the person who left an expensive laptop in view and by an open window.

ETA - according to another of your threads, the police did attend and gather forensic evidence - so they have done something. If the evidence gathered doesn't match existing data then that's out of their control.

You've made it sound like they did nothing at all.

GreyQueen

I work for a local authority. DPA subject access data requests take a lot of time. £10 would barely cover the printing/ postage costs for a lot of them, never mind staff time, which can run into many tens if not hundreds of pounds of person-hours.

The police do not, as a matter of routine, provide victims of crime with written reports of how their investigation was handled. And thank gawd they don't, I'd far rather they were out there working and only doing as much back-office work as was necessary for preparing to submit files to the CPS or gathering intel for investigations and hopefully prevention of some future crimes.

What you want from them is over and above what crime victims normally get and, frankly, £10 is dirt cheap for it. But I would say that it's going to be a wasted tenner because you aren't going to get anywhere with this dispute with the insurer.

Your son has been foolish and lost out to a criminal. He wasn't beaten or terrorised, he isn't scarred for life. No one died. Suck it down and move on. Don't buy a replacement for £1,500. Hell, don't buy a replacement at all.

This is the real world. If you take stupid risks, you're liable to suffer losses. He's lost his MacBook. He can have another when he can buy it himself. End of.

TonyMMM

Charges for reports have been standard for many years - the crime number is all you need for your insurance company, if they want a written report, then they usually pay for it.

Sounds more like the insurance company trying to pass costs on to the customer.

Voyager2002

Has the insurance company definitely said that they require a digitalised version of the report? I have an insurance claim at the moment (insurers have agreed to pay out) and all that they needed was the police crime reference number, so this seems to be the industry standard.

I suggest that you clarify exactly what the insurance company need, and why. If they insist that they need something for which the police charge, you might consider using their complaints procedure.

I recall getting a full police report in Spain not long ago: I was there for the whole process and it was quite a lot of work, so the fee of ten pounds is probably reasonable for the administration involved.