Insurance provider wont send me policy documents

maggiecon

Hi

I took out a policy for car insurance on 08/11/17 for my son who just passed his test. paid £1700 for it.

I canceled the policy on 09/01/18 as he has moved away for work and wont be using the car. The insurance company only refunded £1000!!

I have emailed them several times before cancelling and after to request policy documents but they have yet to provide them, initially they said they didn't have the correct email address and now they are saying they wont provide them as the policy is cancelled.

I want to see what the cancellation terms are to understand why I was charged £700 for 2 months insurance. Is it illegal to enforce unfair T&C's when they weren't made known to me even when I requested them from them.

What should I do next, I dont just want to let them away with it, I would at least like these dodgy practices to be challenged even if I dont get any money back.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Quentin

Is the policy in your name?

If so, then whenever you are unhappy with your insurer the route to go down is a complaint then if you are unhappy with the response or they ignore you for 8 weeks you can escalate to the FOS for their adjudication at no cost to you.

If the policy is not in your name then little you can do as far as complaints go as the insurer has no contract with you

ValiantSon

You should have been provided with the policy documents when you bought the insurance. If you bought it online then it is possible that they were available to download. I'd be very surprised if the insurers had not made the documents available to you as they form part of the contract. They are not obliged to provide them to you again, although it would be reasonable to do so.

You should have received a certificate of motor insurance. Find this and see if the terms and conditions are with it.

Which insurer was it? You may find that the terms and conditions are available on their website to view.

dunstonh

want to see what the cancellation terms are to understand why I was charged £700 for 2 months insurance.

Many publish it on their website. Have you looked?

Is it illegal to enforce unfair T&C's when they weren't made known to me even when I requested them from them.

That is your allegation. They will have an audit trail that shows they were told you. Unless you are saying you never got the schedule and the certificate of insurance and the website didnt state them (which they do).

I would at least like these dodgy practices to be challenged even if I dont get any money back.

Is it dodgy or did you just not read it?

maggiecon

Hi Guys thanks for the quick response

The contract is between my son and the insurer, and he is the one making the communication with them. I am just trying to help him out, as you can image £700 is a lot of money for a 19 year old.

He took out the policy over the phone, he has never received his insurance certificate let alone documents, they rang in December after he had emailed them requesting the docs and they said the reason he has never received them is they didn't input his details correctly on their system. So no website links, post or emails from them.

To date we have received no information from them or any paperwork.

If the T&C's clearly state there is a £300 admin fee for cancellation I would accept that but they wont let me know what the T&C's are.

Should my son email and request a reason why they charged him £700? What should his next step be?

Thanks

dunstonh

If the T&C's clearly state there is a £300 admin fee for cancellation I would accept that but they wont let me know what the T&C's are.

The charge wont be a £300 admin fee. It will be something like £25-£50.

The rest will be any combination of the following:
1 - if he was paying monthly, there is a charge for credit - this is not usually fully refundable
2 - if he had non-refundable extras (such as breakdown) then they are non-refundable.
3 - if he had a telemetrics box installed (as many young drivers do) there is usually a cost if you cancel in year one.
4 - the refund of premium is never exactly pro-rata. In the early months there is a weighting to compensate the insurer/broker/comparison site etc for their time and costs. .e.g cancelling in month 2 is 16% of the time but the refund of premium may be just 70%. i.e. 30% of premium needs to be paid.


He should contact their complaints department and complain about the charges and say that he has not been given any breakdown of the charges. They will breakdown the charges to explain them. And if he is lucky, they may waive some of them as a goodwill gesture (once they have listend to the phone call).

ValiantSon

I agree with what dunstonh says, but if he has really never received any documents, including the certificate then they are at fault. This is something he may wish to include in his complaint. Getting this recorded is important should this need to be taken further.

He should make the complaint in writing.

It may be worth using Resolver https://www.resolver.co.uk/

maggiecon

Once again thanks everyone for the help. Just looking through some of the suggestions for the costs

The charge wont be a £300 admin fee. It will be something like £25-£50. This is what I was expecting it to be

The rest will be any combination of the following:
1 - if he was paying monthly, there is a charge for credit - this is not usually fully refundable. Policy was paid in full at the time it was taken out
2 - if he had non-refundable extras (such as breakdown) then they are non-refundable. . No extras added at the time except legal assitance at £29
3 - if he had a telemetrics box installed (as many young drivers do) there is usually a cost if you cancel in year one. No telematics box added just an online app to record journeys which was free to download
4 - the refund of premium is never exactly pro-rata. In the early months there is a weighting to compensate the insurer/broker/comparison site etc for their time and costs. .e.g cancelling in month 2 is 16% of the time but the refund of premium may be just 70%. i.e. 30% of premium needs to be paid.
30% would seem reasonable to me which would be approx £515, which still leaves me a long way off the £700 figure I have been charged..

Thanks again for your help, I will get my son to raise it with their complaints department. We went with AXA as we didn't want to deal with a dodgy insurance company seems they are all equally bad.

dunstonh

We went with AXA as we didn't want to deal with a dodgy insurance company seems they are all equally bad.

They are not all equally bad and some of the names you may think of as household names are actually not as good as others you may not have heard of. Part of the problem is that the race to the bottom on pure premium has seen other things get added on and quality of service fall away. The sad state of affairs is that people focus on price before quality. There are quality providers with good service. They cost a bit more (often not much) and AXA is not one of them.

When the complaint response comes back, please keep up to do date as it is always interesting to find out what happened next. Plus, it allows others reading your thread in the years to come realise what the issues were and how they got resolved. Good luck.

maggiecon

Hi Guys just a quick update on progress with AXA. They finally issued me a copy of the policy documents and a copy of motor insurance.

The document states that the cancellation terms are they keep 30% premium if cancelled within the first 2 months and 40% premium within first 3 months.

I fall into the 3 month category by one day! I have again written to them to point out that I lost more that one day trying to get information from them before I could cancel the policy eg I didn't even have a policy number to reference in my cancellation letter. Also I lost a couple of days posting the letter as they wouldnt allow me to cancel over the phone. And finally they imposed terms and conditions on me which where never provided to me. I will wait and see what the reply is.

I have asked them to refund the additional 10% that this one day cost me as the delay was due to them not giving me the information in the first place.

Will keep you posted and thanks again for your help.