Car Insurance - how to effectively complain about insurance company?

sammynunes

I made a claim following an accident in Feb 2022 (my fault) and have still not got anything from the insurance company.

It's a rather long winded story which I won't go into in detail but essentially they wrote off my vehicle and made an offer which is nowhere near reflective of market value (it's a camper van so market prices are ludicrously high and it was insured as a camper van).

I rejected the offer immediately and asked them for a more realistic valuation. Since that I have not had any communication with them about the claim for nearly a year.

I have complained twice to them. They responded to the first complaint with an offer of compensation and a promise (since unfulfilled) to expedite the claim. They made no effort to pay the compensation nor did any more progess with the claim take place. As a result, I elevated the case to the FOS and they awarded further compensation and requested the company expedite the claim. The FOS suggested I now send examples of similar vans to aid the valuation which I did......and got no reponse.

Fast forward two more months and I complained again. This time they ignored the complaint and so I went to the FOS again, requesting that the FOS rule on the valuation dispute. The FOS have now come back to me again and merely just awarded me more compensation.

The problem now is that I'm just stuck in a loop. The insurance company will not communicate, will not negotiate on value (or even acknowledge/reject my suggested valuation) and will not pay any compensation that they have offered or that the FOS has said they should pay.

I've thus concluded that the FOS is pretty useless here and I'm looking for other ways to progress and/or complain. Reviews of the insurer seem to suggest that this is their usual business model and they rely on people being desparate for their payout to bounce them into accepting derisory amounts.

I'm in the enviable position whereby I could repair my van and get it running (tbh it should never have been written off but the valuation engineer didn't really have a clue what he was looking at or talking about) and don't need the money so I can push this to try and get some form of action against this very dodgy company.

So what would people suggest I do?

dunstonh

I've thus concluded that the FOS is pretty useless here and I'm looking for other ways to progress and/or complain. Reviews of the insurer seem to suggest that this is their usual business model and they rely on people being desparate for their payout to bounce them into accepting derisory amounts.

The FOS are not useless.   The FOS have upheld your complaint and it is legally binding on the insurer.   if they still refuse to pay out, then you do what you do with anyone that owes you money.  You take them to court. 

I'm in the enviable position whereby I could repair my van and get it running (tbh it should never have been written off but the valuation engineer didn't really have a clue what he was looking at or talking about) and don't need the money so I can push this to try and get some form of action against this very dodgy company.

If you have a specialist/classic vehicle, you are best to insure with a company that focuses on that type of vehicle.   Otherwise the you suffer the problems you have mentioned.

Annemos

Good evening

Just checking.... has this gone to the full Ombudsman ruling? Or has it stalled at the interim Adjudication stage? If it is at the Adjudication stage, then I believe the Insurance Company can refuse to accept the Adjudication and will then let it go the full Ombudsman for a final binding decision.      (But I always imagined that you would be informed if that was happening.) 

So assuming it has been ruled on by the full Ombudsman......

Does this attached link help you at all? (I did not need to chase up in my case. But I had done some googling, in case there was a problem.)

It links in to what dunstonh has said about taking them to court.

(The FOS has done their job and made a decision to solve a dispute. But they are not themselves mandated to take any legal action against the Insurer on your behalf to enforce that decision. That has to be done by yourself, if necessary.) 

I do hope it gets sorted out for you. What a pain! This article implies such a problem is rather rare. 


https://debtcamel.co.uk/enforce-financial-ombudsman-decision/

sammynunes

Both FOS decisions have come to the interim Adjudication stage and on both occasions the insurance company accepted the outcome.

The problem is, that the dispute is a valuation dispute and the FOS is only considering it as a dispute about communication...so they are not even acknowledgeing the dispute about valuation exists.

The compensation offered by the company and additional compensation offered by the FOS is pretty insignificant in value compared to the gap of valuation (for reference they are offering £5K on a van which is worth £18K). I've actually told the insurer AND the FOS that I am not particularly interested in compensation anyway.....just a fair valuation for my van so it's not really about enforcing a decision because the decision isn't relevant!

For what it's worth, this is with a specialist campervan insurance company....or at least an insurance company pretending to be a specialist. I should have had initial concerns when the valution engineer didn't know what a rock and roll bed was.

tacpot12

I think that if the Insurance company has accepted the Ombudsman decision in writing, then it should be actionable. Do you have home insunrance, and if so, do you have legal expenses cover? If you do, then I would suggest you call the Legal Helpline provided by your insurer to see if they will take the matter to court for you with just an decision at the adjudication stage.   

Annemos

It is interesting you say that, OP. When I was going through the FOS process, I became aware that not everything I was complaining about, was being considered as part of the whole complaint for a decision. (Mentioned, but not considered in the Summary.)

So it was as if the FOS was separating out the issues into steps. This implied that I would have to submit more than one FOS complaint to get all the issues dealt with. 

So mine was 1) awful damaging repair work on building. Plus 2) the fact they they were heavily overloading the total claim cost and I considered that unfair treatment. (Subsidence), 

In the first Adjudication decision, I could not understand why issue 2) was only mentioned in the Adjudicator description of what had gone on. But it was NOT mentioned in the final summary of what needed to be done. (It just said in the main body, that the customer is worried about this issue 2 and that they might consider looking into it.)

I asked the Adjudicator about this and the person implied that I should first make my decision on Step 1 first.  But that I would have to make a second complaint if 2)  was still not fair. 


Can you ask the Adjudicator to really describe what is going on? Are they also splitting yours up into a Complaint you made about how they communicated and time delays etc. But then taking the position that the valuation would be a separate issue. Do they require you to submit another complaint on specifically the valuation?? (Later, they then link the cases.) 


(When this happens, I am not clear if it is to do with how we the consumer draft our wording in our complaint. The timing of happenings. Or whether the FOS has some sort of internal mechanism, to spilt issues into stages.) 

I spent about 3 months after I had accepted the Adjudication moaning on to the Insurance about Issue 2).   It took me a real concerted effort to make contact with the actual people who had been responsible for dealing with the first Ombudsman Complaint. (At the Insurance Company's MGA level.) I also went to their customer Service person and she was an enormous help. I sent them lots of evidence and they did sort it out in the end. But it took me such a lot of effort, as their first inclination is just to say NO (too much effort/?!!)  I also had to find loads of FOS cases that supported my position and sent them those as well. 

Annemos

PS    Yes I was also alerted right from the start of the claim, OP. (Your rock and roll bed.)

You can almost foresee that trouble will be brewing right from the outset. Mine attached the plan to my claim of somebody else's bungalow!  And they were "experts" on Subsidence!  

And when they were attaching the app snapshot for the Soil make-up of my address I had to tell them three times before they got it right and attached my address. (The middle one, I was placed in some uplands, a hundred miles from me!) 

They muttered..... "oh, when the actual borehole has been completed, that will be the proper confirmation of the soil make-up". But the damage was done to my confidence. And I have always suspected they did not order enough boreholes, because the desk-based engineer, had got the wrong plan information right at the start. That also ended up in a big complaint! And it carried on like that. 

After that happens to one.....I did not trust these people one inch. And I was always proven correct right to the end. 

moneysaver128

The OP asks how to effectively complain about an Insurer? There are many difficulties. Obviously they are very large companies with a lot of legal and commercial weight to rebuff complaints. It is noticeable that recently the Insurers are making a huge effort to present themselves as listening and on the Insured's side. And when things go wrong they want to put things right. As customers we all have different opinions about that. One thing I will say is that the Ombudsman service are often quite weak. There is a huge discussion going on that the different Ombudsman services are not really up to the job and the commercial companies are not worried by them. Indeed as the Ombudsman will often state they are not there to police or punish but to reach  a mutual agreement. Customers usually want  more than that and think the Ombudsman will hold the companies to account. I have had Ombudsman state the maximum they can award (not fine) from a company is £250. This may be after months of wrangling and procedure. There has been much comment on this in the media: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-it-so-hard-to-get-justice-when-we-are-being-ripped-off-8jssxg6qx
The answer is it is very hard to complain effectively about an insurer at present.

Annemos

Another problem is, once it gets to a certain stage where things have gone wrong and you have said you are going to the Ombudsman, then the Insurance Company and Loss Adjusters will often refuse to deal with the customer any more and wait for the decision. 

I was told that they would abide by the decision. As moneysaver128 says, it is in the form of a mutual agreement as to the way forward..... and not a punishing mechanism. 

I found that the FOS has a team who works on Subsidence and I was very happy with the way they dealt with the case. The thoroughness of their review etc. Considering all the documents and photos in detail. And my own Engineering reports. 

I was asked what I wanted as an outcome and that was passed back to the Insurance Company. They took that on board and came up with a couple of reservations/provisos about my solution. So that was a discussion again. And we came to the compromise. 

I always had the impression that the Insurance Company was taking things seriously, once it was at the Ombudsman. And in fact I found out, that the Insurance Company had not been aware of all the things that had gone wrong on the claim. 

(The claim was going down a chain...."Insurance Company...to MGA.... to Claim Handlers".     Insurance company and MGA are very hands-off, until it gets to the FOS.)


Just to add. The FOS does not provide any experts. They do not have their own engineers, inspectors, car valuers etc etc. They also do not take a consumer's word on such things (the consumer is a layperson and not an expert). Therefore, the consumer has to find suitably qualified people who will do a report, to provide that proof for the FOS. That is often not an easy task for a consumer. (Or some other evidence. There have been older posts on here about proving car valuations.)