Car insurance - only offered a £0.60 or £0.00 refund!

edphill

Hello everyone,

I have an interesting question here for you all.

We took out an insurance policy on 10/09/2016 for one male 55 year old driver for £177.39 with his wife on the policy as well. Policy from One Call who are a broker for Sabre insurance.

On 20/02/2017 we added his 17 year old daughter (my sister) on to the policy for an additional £166.60 (£127.60 to the insurer and £39 admin fee to One Call). This would last for 202 days, until the expiry of the insurance.

Yesterday we gave her a car and taxed and insured it for her so we no longer needed to insure her.

Today (27/5/17) we called to remove her from the first policy as it's now redundant. We were told by the broker that we would only receive a £0.60 refund, which seems ridiculous considering how much it was to add her on to the policy.

The One Call terms and conditions say they will charge £39 for any change, so I can understand that would be applicable.

The Sabre policy wording says this:

"Subject to no claim arising in the current period of insurance, the insurer will give a return of premium for the unexpired portion of the policy"

So a £0.60 refund for removing my sister from the policy (after only using 97 of her 202 insured days) seems a little ludicrous.

I asked about cancelling the policy altogether and was told we wouldn't receive a refund at all!

Any thoughts on this much appreciated.

agrinnall

To simplify things lets say you've used half of the period for which you paid the extra £166.60 (it's actually a bit less). So the premium refund would be £83.30. Take off One Call's £39 charge and that leaves £44.30. The insurer can make a policy change charge, which can reasonably be up to £50. In your case it looks like the charge is £43.70, leaving you with a refund of 60p.

You can ask for the charges to be explained in full, but I'd expect it to be something like this.

edphill

Thank you for your reply. That makes sense. I will speak with them tomorrow and ask them to explain the charges in full.