Car insurance

Ilovecubbage

I need advise, please.
I need a car insurance which is going to be the first time in my life I had always been as a main driver for 20 + on my ex partners insurance. 
He has been the policy holder but 6 month ago someone hit me and there is a claim which wasn't my fault but it is still going on.
As I wasn't the policy holder do I need to say it? 
Will I be classed as new driver because I have never had an insurance?
It says that the policy holder has to declare it.

Also can anyone recommend a good insurance company if anything happened, there's a lot of bad companies that don't want to deal with it when something happens and keep fobbing you off just like the one he's got.

DullGreyGuy

Ilovecubbage said:

I need advise, please.
I need a car insurance which is going to be the first time in my life I had always been as a main driver for 20 + on my ex partners insurance. 
He has been the policy holder but 6 month ago someone hit me and there is a claim which wasn't my fault but it is still going on.
As I wasn't the policy holder do I need to say it? 
Will I be classed as new driver because I have never had an insurance?
It says that the policy holder has to declare it.

Also can anyone recommend a good insurance company if anything happened, there's a lot of bad companies that don't want to deal with it when something happens and keep fobbing you off just like the one he's got.

You need to answer the questions you are asked honestly and completely. They almost certainly will ask for each person named on the policy if they have been involved in an incident irrespective of if you claimed or not and irrespective of fault. You were involved in an incident and so would have to answer yes. 

No, new driver is based on your driving licence not your insurance history.

Claims involving other parties are more complex because one insurer alone can only go so far before they need to be dealing with the other insurer and clearly you have no control over who the other person decided to insure with. Even the best insurer in the world can't suddenly make another insurer that is understaffed and massive backlog respond any quicker to their enquiries. 

Most household names will be ok, remember when you are looking at the lists of prices on confused.com etc that you and everyone else chooses the cheapest one on the list hence its created a race to the bottom to cut costs and get higher up that list. We are somewhat the authors of our own misfortune on that front. 

Mildly_Miffed

Ilovecubbage said:

I need a car insurance which is going to be the first time in my life I had always been as a main driver for 20 + on my ex partners insurance.

No problem, common situation.

He has been the policy holder but 6 month ago someone hit me and there is a claim which wasn't my fault but it is still going on.
As I wasn't the policy holder do I need to say it?

Of course.

They ask about your personal driving history.

Because it's not settled yet, it'll be counted as an at-fault claim. "fault" in this instance simply means "did it cost your insurer money?" - and there is still a possibility it will.

Will I be classed as new driver because I have never had an insurance?

No, you've been driving 20 years.

It says that the policy holder has to declare it.

Indeed. But also the actual driver needs to.

Also can anyone recommend a good insurance company if anything happened, there's a lot of bad companies that don't want to deal with it when something happens

They're all pretty similar, tbh. Most of them are the same couple of companies just with different brands.

and keep fobbing you off just like the one he's got.

That's probably not quite true.

They can't close it as a no-fault claim until the other insurer pay. The fact they're still working on it shows they're actually on your side, and not just shrugging and taking the easy route.

DullGreyGuy

Mildly_Miffed said:
They're all pretty similar, tbh. Most of them are the same couple of companies just with different brands.

Many companies do have multiple brandnames however the largest insurer (Admiral) only has 10% of the market so its much more than "a couple".

It would be hard to say exactly how many there are because it depends on your definitions, if an intermediary has delegated authority to write business say from Aviva such that Aviva never knows you personally are on cover via them do you still count that as Aviva or is it the intermediary?