Car Insurance Doubled Please Help

m344

retiringtoosoon said:

People who are involved in accidents tend to be at increased risk of having more accidents. Learn to be a better defensive driver

Agree with the first sentence. My query is whether doubling the insurance is reasonable in this circumstance. 2nd seems stupid, how would you know what kind of driver I am from one incident? 

m344

DullGreyGuy said:

motorguy said:

m344 said:

Hello everyone,

A year ago (last May 2022) I was in a car accident on a roundabout. Another driver from the left hit me. He told his insurers I was in the wrong lane (right) trying to get into his (left). In fact he was trying to get into the right lane as he was going right. After we exchanged details he got back onto the roundabout and kept going right -I got a picture of him getting back on when according to his story -that was his exit hence him being in the left lane.

My premium renewed in June and was reasonable. Now May 2023 my premium has gone up over 100% and is circa £3000! I literally do not have the money but also they are not doing anything to try and settle this claim. I've called all year and I literally have to do this to get them to chase the other insurer. Today they literally asked me to send the photos again. They've had them since May last year! Given that you give way to the right on a roundabout and that he was not telling the truth and I have photos. Is there anything more I can do to get this recorded as non-fault? I don't have the money for the new premium price and need to get this settled asap. Cannot get rid of the car as it's leased and cannot insure anywhere else as the price are just as bad due to the unsettled status. I was also injured during this accident so really annoyed Churchill is dragging their heels.

Get to a solicitor ASAP and have them push this for you.

My son was in a similar position a few years back and the insurance cos were going to settle for a 50/50 even though the other party wholly came in to my sons lane.  The solicitor handled it all and got it sorted out. 

Dont rely on your insurance company's representation to do this for you - they are only interested in it costing as little as possible for them, rather than getting the right outcome for you.

Why have you not mentioned how much the solicitor cost him? As this is a small claims court action this will be a cost the OP will have to cover themselves and will be unrecoverable from anyone. Can be false economy to pay a solicitor £5,000 to try and avoid a £1,500 premium increase (half of which is probably unrelated to the claim anyway)

Thanks, the cost of a solicitor is something to think about. It appears the increase is solely this as I have done the insurance calculator recording this as non-fault etc to see similar prices. I've had no other changes in circumstance so was easy to do.

m344

Krakkkers said:

Just read on a frugal living website that renewing insurance in February gets a cheaper quote?

Thanks but a bit tricky now that I need to renew by June. Not sure how I could get around this.

GrumpyDil

m344 said:

DullGreyGuy said:

motorguy said:

m344 said:

Hello everyone,

A year ago (last May 2022) I was in a car accident on a roundabout. Another driver from the left hit me. He told his insurers I was in the wrong lane (right) trying to get into his (left). In fact he was trying to get into the right lane as he was going right. After we exchanged details he got back onto the roundabout and kept going right -I got a picture of him getting back on when according to his story -that was his exit hence him being in the left lane.

My premium renewed in June and was reasonable. Now May 2023 my premium has gone up over 100% and is circa £3000! I literally do not have the money but also they are not doing anything to try and settle this claim. I've called all year and I literally have to do this to get them to chase the other insurer. Today they literally asked me to send the photos again. They've had them since May last year! Given that you give way to the right on a roundabout and that he was not telling the truth and I have photos. Is there anything more I can do to get this recorded as non-fault? I don't have the money for the new premium price and need to get this settled asap. Cannot get rid of the car as it's leased and cannot insure anywhere else as the price are just as bad due to the unsettled status. I was also injured during this accident so really annoyed Churchill is dragging their heels.

Get to a solicitor ASAP and have them push this for you.

My son was in a similar position a few years back and the insurance cos were going to settle for a 50/50 even though the other party wholly came in to my sons lane.  The solicitor handled it all and got it sorted out. 

Dont rely on your insurance company's representation to do this for you - they are only interested in it costing as little as possible for them, rather than getting the right outcome for you.

Why have you not mentioned how much the solicitor cost him? As this is a small claims court action this will be a cost the OP will have to cover themselves and will be unrecoverable from anyone. Can be false economy to pay a solicitor £5,000 to try and avoid a £1,500 premium increase (half of which is probably unrelated to the claim anyway)

Thanks, the cost of a solicitor is something to think about. It appears the increase is solely this as I have done the insurance calculator recording this as non-fault etc to see similar prices. I've had no other changes in circumstance so was easy to do.

Careful about doing dummy quotes using your correct details as previous posts and comments on this site have suggested that might cause issues. 

m344

macman said:

That increase could largely be down to loss of NCB, if not protected.

Completely understand this but I've built up another year since this incident. 

DullGreyGuy

m344 said:

DullGreyGuy said:

Unfortunately roundabout accidents often end up 50/50 because people are bad at describing them, in most cases both parties allege the other drifted into their lane and each story is as plausible as the next. Rather than roll a dice on who the judge believes the insurers avoid the legal costs by agreeing to the split liability. This wont help you though as "fault" means they couldnt recover all their outlay and a 50/50 settlement means they can only recover 50% and have to pay 50% of the other side's. A settled 50/50 claim will have the same impact as an open claim for most insurers.

As to trying to speed matters up, it really depends on the delay. Have the third party insurers acknowledged the claim? Have they confirmed no indemnity queries? Have they advised their stance on liability? What were the next steps agreed between the insurers?

It sounds like your insurers arent confident enough in your case to want to risk going to court, even if they go and win they still cannot recover costs and so prefer to try and deal with it out of court.

Completely understand that but this is where it gets weird. They were sure and advised me of this on the phone many times. They literally said verbatim from the information presented they class the other driver as at fault and would take this to court. No new info has been presented from the other party since so I'm not sure how they have u-turned.

The people you are speaking to are unlikely to be the ones that make the final decision, they may not even be the ones that decide if to pass it on to the ones that make the decision.

In my claims days you had the call centre, they took first notification of loss and most inbound calls from customers wanting an updated and were "claims handlers". You then had the technical teams that sat behind them that dealt with the third parties etc, these were divided up into specialisms (recoveries, disputed liability, fault and TP injury) and were "claims technicians". Those teams didn't have their telephone numbers published on websites etc (other than maybe Fault) and some very much liked customers not knowing the telephone number.

Finally you had litigation, they dealt with, as the name suggests, cases involving litigation either being cases we litigated where the customer had no Legal Expenses insurance or cases the third party had litigated against us. They were predominately lawyers but occasionally you'd get someone who's done high value injury defence claims getting to work for them.

The final decision on if to litigate sat with Litigation if you didn't have LE cover. As a claims technician I'd refer my file to them if I felt we had reasonable reasons to want to. 

Chances are you are speaking to the call centre, they have minimum training and are reading notes off screen from the more technical teams. They can at times go off script or not understand notes etc plus will sometimes say what the customer wants to hear. 

Robin9

Just had my renewal - from £164 to £182

Car_54

Robin9 said:

Just had my renewal - from £164 to £182

And how does that help the OP, especially six weeks after he posted?