No Claims Discount Con.

LindasMan

I have not had an insurance claim for 17 years, but every time I change insurer I only get proof of 9 years. Some say this is not a big deal, but it is. I have just changed insurer and declared my 17 years NCB. My old company issued the Proof of NCB of 9 years. In the small print of an insurance policy it states that a false declaration could invalidate the policy. I contacted my new insurer and explained the situation. I was told that if I reduced my NCB to 9 years I would have to pay an additional premium of £141.99, so insurers restricting their declaration to 9 years is a big issue. He gave me the option to leave the NCB at 17 years, but said if anything happened they may ask for proof of the 17 years I was claiming to have. Of course I can not do that, so had to pay up. I only have my own record of my claims. I intend to write to the Insurance Ombudsman regarding this matter as I feel the motorist is being conned by the insurers again.
It is the same with your driving licence. Most comparison sites only go up to 20+ years for holding a driving licence. However, when I went into the insurers own site for choosing addons I changed this to my actual 57 years and the quoted premium went down.  

RunsFromRobots

The whole insurance industry is a con.

vacheron

I keep the documents and/or renewal letter from the last insurer who stated the highest NCD so if this ever happens you can defend it by using this figure and then getting a letter from your subsequent insurers stating that you never had a claim while on their policy.

You will still end up with this being capped eventually though as I have never made a claim in 34 years of driving, yet the maximum I recall being able to declare on an online application is "20+ years".

I've never had mine capped at 9 years though despite changing insurers almost every year.

Keep_pedalling

With most insurers the maximum discount is set at 9 years, so having more than that makes no difference to the cost of the policy. Your current insurer is obviously not one of those. Those that offer longer NC discounts are probable no cheaper it just takes longer to get the maximum discount. 

MyRealNameToo

LindasMan said:

I have not had an insurance claim for 17 years, but every time I change insurer I only get proof of 9 years. Some say this is not a big deal, but it is. I have just changed insurer and declared my 17 years NCB. My old company issued the Proof of NCB of 9 years. In the small print of an insurance policy it states that a false declaration could invalidate the policy. I contacted my new insurer and explained the situation. I was told that if I reduced my NCB to 9 years I would have to pay an additional premium of £141.99, so insurers restricting their declaration to 9 years is a big issue. He gave me the option to leave the NCB at 17 years, but said if anything happened they may ask for proof of the 17 years I was claiming to have. Of course I can not do that, so had to pay up. I only have my own record of my claims. I intend to write to the Insurance Ombudsman regarding this matter as I feel the motorist is being conned by the insurers again.
It is the same with your driving licence. Most comparison sites only go up to 20+ years for holding a driving licence. However, when I went into the insurers own site for choosing addons I changed this to my actual 57 years and the quoted premium went down.  

What was the split on the premiums between fees and premiums? 

Have you done a repeat quote with the lower NCD? There are certain brokers who are well known for charging £100+ for changing the day you passed your test by a day or ownership of a car for a month. Little to do with the change in risk but much more to do with the loss of the new/renewal business discount. 

Historically companies used to recognise up to 5 years NCD, then some bright spark decided they could get marketing credit for 9 years, the silliness of it however was that at 9 years NCD they were actually giving less discount than we did at 5 years however people didnt twig that nor it took them longer to get there but they just clung onto the fact its 9 years so must be better. 

In our case we had a single digit field that held NCD in our db, over 80% of people have maximum NCD and so our call centre agents just hovered their finger over 5 when doing a quote because 5-9 makes no difference and the system can't take above 9. To avoid the calls our letters would simply state 5+ years. 

Insurance systems are often ancient things, sometimes with a pretty new front end put over it but it doesnt stop change being expensive. Once looked at changing a policy duration to be over 12 months and the IT quote was £25m with a 1% chance that it wouldnt go over budget. Why am I going to spend millions increasing the number of years NCD I can store only to support customers going elsewhere?

When an insurer decides to change from the market norm, such as accepting additional years NCD, they know the challenges they will face. Back in the day the lead insurer on the 9 years NCD was straight forward, you show your renewal letter 5 years ago showing 5+ years and the 4 renewals since each showing no claims and they can count their fingers and realise you've added up to 9 

There is no "insurance ombudsman", insurance is covered by the Financial Ombudsman. You can only complain to the FOS after you have complained to the financial services company and either you have their final response to your complaint or 8 weeks have passed, whichever is sooner. 

Each insurer comes up with its own question set and given most questions have fixed responses, a list of options. An aggregator/comparison site in theory is trying to make things efficient for you to get quotes from hundreds of sellers at the same time but how do you deal with the fact everyone has different questions and different options for the same questions? If you are big boy like Aviva or Direct Line you can tell the aggregators you will only be on the site if an additional question is added, if you are a tiny broker with only a few thousand customers then you will conform to the aggregators requirements or you won't be on them. 

The only way what you want to work would be if "where is your car kept" had 300 options, if you select "on your driveway" then thats it because everyone recognises that option but if you selected "in a private carpark with security away from my property" then you'd have to have a second drop down with the options of those insurers that dont offer that option and then keep repeating until you've given an answer every insurer recognises. In practice you dont have to answer the question two dozen times instead the insurer will map it to what they think is probably the closest answer based on what options they offer but again if you go to their site you may find there is a better description because on your tiny brokers website they have "in a private carpark with security and CCTV away from my property" as an option but haven't convinced the aggregators to add it as a new option. 

Baldytyke88

It all comes down to getting numerous quotes online, just go for the cheapest or best quality.