Car Insurance and NCD - is it worth it??

wilkesy1979

Hi, 

Im just in the middle of a complaint with Admiral over my current car insurance policy. I recently sent back a lease car that had come to the end of its term, which i insured and also declared my NCD against. A couple of months ago i found my perfect replacement car and purchased it. As i cant use NCD on more than 1 vehicle, i insured it with 0 years NCD. Today, i cancelled my old policy and transferred my NCD to my new car, only to be told 'Thank you, your payment has now increased by £70 for the rest of the policy'. At this point, i asked them to explain why. This was £30 for admin costs, £44 for adding the NCD protection. So i asked what discount my maximum NCD had given me. I was told £7.25 (about 1.4%). As you can imagine, i was confused. I asked the agent to help explain this to me but even he couldn't. We both agreed that it was best to not have any NCD as it just inflates the cost of the policy. I did log a complaint against this, mainly because neither the agent or his manager could explain why it was such a small discount when they boast an 'Average of 27% NCD discount for customers'. 

This then prompted me to look at a new policy and what the costs would be. This is where i became even more confused. I went onto the 'comparethemarket.com' website as this is where i had my previous quotes from. I quickly hit the re-quote button to get the latest quote against my car. This was still without the NCD added so the quotes were all with 0 NCD. They came through, the cheapest being £555.05. I liked the look of that, so proceeded to go back and add in my NCD. I did this, added in the maximum NCD, which is what i had and hit 'Quote me'. At this point i was very very very surprised. For changing nothing but the NCD, double checking that i put the maximum, all of the policies had increased. The cheapest policy was now £740. It would have been more if i added NCD protection too.  Why are insurance companies adding a massive fee on for having a NCD? Surely this is done to help reduce policies and keep them lower for safer drivers??

I dont see the point in having, or declaring NCD on car insurance anymore. Or is there something i am missing??

Cheers

DullGreyGuy

Its both surprising and odd that all policies reacted in the same way, having done my own random test with confused.com premiums are generally cheaper with the NCD than on nil and the exact percentage is being applied varies fairly substantially so Churchill went from being cheapest to 8th place, LV= goes from 2nd to 1st with a larger discount than Churchill.

Are they possibly different brands of the same company (eg Admiral, Elephant, Diamond or DL, Churchill, Privilege)? That may explain the uniform change. 

The other consideration is counter fraud measures, if people are doing multiple quotes and changing things that shouldn't change in normal life then some insurers get twitchy and as a consequence load premiums. If you've been doing "testing" it could be the increase is a defence mechanism rather than due to NCD changing.