Car Insurance Policy showing accidents older than stated 3 years

bilko89

Hi everyone,

I was looking at my car insurance policy this morning and noticed that although their question asks "Have you had any claims or accidents in the last 3 years, involving any vehicle?" there are 2 accidents on there from 2020 and 2021, obviously older than the 3 years! 

I do have one which happened in July 2024 which is correct but should I contact them to remove these two older ones and hopefully reduce my insurance cost? I'm currently 5 months into the policy.

DullGreyGuy

It's unlikely that it makes any difference. 

Certainly with our systems we asked about claims in the last 5 years but we didnt delete older claims for those customers who'd been with us longer but the pricing engine ignored anything over 5 years old. Like many things with that company our new MD wanted to remove them from letters but the IT costs to do so was high and he couldn't make the business case to stand up so it was one of hundreds of changes to letters put on the shelf to be revisited when we finally changed our ancient mainframe system generating letters to a modern system where the business can change letters freely rather than paying 5-6 figure sums to IT developers 

cw8825

No. The ones from 5 years should be there as another insurer may ask for 5

Your insurer will not be using them to price the policy

bilko89

Thanks for the quick replies. @DullGreyGuy it makes sense as it would probably stop a ton of calls/emails with questions similar to mines. @cw8825 thanks, the last 5 years is what I'm used to previously so that does make sense.

DullGreyGuy

bilko89 said:

Thanks for the quick replies. DullGreyGuy it makes sense as it would probably stop a ton of calls/emails with questions similar to mines

That was the thought but for a month of asking the 500 or so call centre agents to flag any call of that nature showed there was about 10 minutes a month spent on such calls. At the time call centre salary was c£16,000 so basically it was about £30 a year we were spending on fielding such calls and with a cost of c£50,000 to make the letter change the payback period vastly over the maximum of 3 years. Even if you think the agents were bad at flagging calls and we only got 10% of the actual calls it's still £300 a year -v- £50,000.

People dont read their renewal docs! 

We had a similar issue another time when we removed the question of "where do you keep your car overnight" because we hadn't rated on it in years. Again to remove the answer from letters would double the cost of the project and so the decision was to leave it there, for new customers there'd be no answer next to it but renewing customers it would show their last answer. There was fears we'd not meet our business case because of renewing customers calling to say they now park on their driveway or such but it was equally a damp squib with virtually no callers.