Damage to car

Sandtree

DB1904 said:

Grumpy_chap said:

DB1904 said:

Sandtree said:

DB1904 said:

Sandtree said:

DB1904 said:

Sandtree said:

DB1904 said:

Sandtree said:

Happens all the time, people massively underestimate the cost of repairs and so initially say to settle privately and later become a pain when they see the size of the bill.

Your insurers arent going to have too many more tools at their disposal than you have, they can reimburse the £270 less your excess but thats unlikely to be economical in the long run. Worth seeing if there is any "hit and run promise" but not sure if it'd be triggered given you have some details.

You could attempt reporting it to the police for refusing to exchange details but normally thats dealt with by a producer being sent to the DVLA address held against the registration but you dont have the reg. Maybe the cops would call him and get a better response than you.

Have you not spoken to your neighbour to try and get his name? After that maybe trawl social media for photos of him plus beloved bike to get a reg plate but you are on a bit of thin ice given he may have multiple bikes.

The only things they could establish with the registration number of his car (assuming it's insured and the bike was too) that the OP couldn't are his surname, home address, the registration number of the bike and the policy of insurance covering it at the time of the incident. But as you say not many more tools. 

I suspect doing a DVLA query on an unrelated vehicle in the hope the registered keeper is the same as the bike probably is against the T&Cs of the DVLA tool.

In my claims days dashcam footage was rare and the little there was was often poor quality (same as CCTV). In theory though dashcam footage could capture registrations plates of various potential witnesses but again I doubt the DVLA allows speculative queries.

[Deleted User] said:

There's small claims court.

How exactly do you go to the small claims @[Deleted User] when you only have the first name and mobile number of the person you are suing? 

Who suggested using the DVLA? All that info can be obtained from the insurance database.

MID must have changed since I last used it... our system simply would return the insurer, policynumber and contact number for the insurer when we ran a MID query on a registration plate for a given date. It wouldnt bring back the name and address of the policyholder so that you could write to the third party about an unrelated vehicle.

We would do a DVLA query for £2.50 to get the details of the owner of a vehicle. 

So you weren't able to search on a postcode for vehicles insured at an address both present and historic?

Not via MID, obviously could for anything insured within our group... whilst its not THAT many years ago our claims system at the time was still a green screen system in Windows wrapper; they had built proper GUIs for Sales & Service plus some for FNOL and 1st Party teams but us in technical claims were still on pure green screen. PF15 was a MID request if memory served me right, couldnt even do a MID query for anything other than the date of loss, would come up with a new screen with the result and the option to add it to the TP record (overwriting whatever TPI info was already there) or to discard it. 

My later boss I found out held a financial interest in the system and so why it had been retained when M&A work was done and acquisitions came with more modern systems suddenly made sense. 

From a GDPR perspective its not abundantly clear in what circumstances an insurer could justify getting the personal data of a whole street of people by doing a search on MID using a postcode.

It's freely available to all police forces via the PNC, so it must be a good number of years since you used it. 

Since when were insurers and police forces the same thing?

Both have access to the same database. 

The general public also have access to the same database but all three are unlikely to have the identical access to the db... for a start insurers can write to the db to add/remove vehicles etc.

Grumpy_chap

DB1904 said:

Grumpy_chap said:

Since when were insurers and police forces the same thing?

Both have access to the same database. 

Really?
I'm sure there are some databases that can be accessed by insurers and the Police. I am also certain there must be some database information within the PNC that is simply not available to insurers.  Furthermore, the Police have far more remit as to why they can search for information.

DB1904

Grumpy_chap said:

DB1904 said:

Grumpy_chap said:

Since when were insurers and police forces the same thing?

Both have access to the same database. 

Really?
I'm sure there are some databases that can be accessed by insurers and the Police. I am also certain there must be some database information within the PNC that is simply not available to insurers.  Furthermore, the Police have far more remit as to why they can search for information.

There's only one MIB database.

GrumpyDil

DB1904 said:

Grumpy_chap said:

DB1904 said:

Grumpy_chap said:

Since when were insurers and police forces the same thing?

Both have access to the same database. 

Really?
I'm sure there are some databases that can be accessed by insurers and the Police. I am also certain there must be some database information within the PNC that is simply not available to insurers.  Furthermore, the Police have far more remit as to why they can search for information.

There's only one MIB database.

But as @Grumpy_chap says what makes you think insurers would have the same level of access as the police via the PNC? Simply put I can see an argument for the police to be able to do a postcode check but far harder to justify that for an insurer.

Not saying that they can't but difficult to accept an argument that the police can do therefore insurers must be able to.

Jenni_D

A database can hold as much data as the database owner can (lawfully) retain. What others can see depends entirely on their approved access level and preloaded reports/queries.

Therefore it is perfectly feasible for the police and insurers to access the same (single) database yet see entirely different data sets.  

Sandtree

Jenni_D said:

A database can hold as much data as the database owner can (lawfully) retain. What others can see depends entirely on their approved access level and preloaded reports/queries.

Therefore it is perfectly feasible for the police and insurers to access the same (single) database yet see entirely different data sets.  

They certainly have more fundamentally different access given that insurers can update the database (ie advise of new policies, cancellation etc) whereas the police would only be able to update their own vehicles if covered by a commercial insurance policy.

Jenni_D

Very true. The point being raised though was what data any party can see rather than what they can do.  

Sandtree

Jenni_D said:

Very true. The point being raised though was what data any party can see rather than what they can do.  

acknowledged but it reinforces the point that all access isnt equal, after all any member of the public can also go to AskMID and get details from the same database and no one is going to claim thats the same as what the police see

Jenni_D

I think we're in agreement.  

DB1904

Jenni_D said:

A database can hold as much data as the database owner can (lawfully) retain. What others can see depends entirely on their approved access level and preloaded reports/queries.

Therefore it is perfectly feasible for the police and insurers to access the same (single) database yet see entirely different data sets.  

Have you accessed that database at all?