Car insurance increase after accident

Woodstok2000

Thumper1963 said:

Hi, thanks for all the replies. Sorry, i wasn't clear in my original post. The £300 extra was purely the extra amount for changing the car. That was in addition to the premium already paid for in full for the year. It wasnt a massive upgrade, so i assumed the extra amount was due to the accident fault being proven.

Did you look at costs for insuring the new car elsewhere?

MyRealNameToo

sheslookinhot said:

MyRealNameToo said:

matt_drummer said:

born_again said:

Thumper1963 said:

Hi,

We had an accident at the end of Nov and our car was written off. When we changed vehicle we paid over £300 for the remaining

6 month of the policy. I understand that there was going to be an increase whilst the liability was being established, even though

we were confident it was not our fault.

Now that it has been agreed we are not at fault we seemingly are unable to get any of the money back from the increased premium.

We are out of pocket through no fault of ours and our insurance company pockets the extra money. They seemingly are the only ones that came out of it better off.

The exact same thing happened to us on a different car a couple of years ago. Is this just some kind of loophole that car insurance companies use. It feels unfair to me and bordering on a scam. Am i missing something or do we have rights in getting our money back?

So how much did the insurance company pay you for the write off?
Compared to how much you paid for the policy?

Presumably the insurer of the at fault party paid for the OP's car?

The OP's insurer didn't pay, so in this respect, the OP is not wrong.

No, the OP's insurer paid for it, they will recover that from the third party insurers along with any allocated claims expenses but ultimately are still out of pocket for the unallocated claims expenses like the staff in the claims team, the office that houses them, the software they use etc.

These are no “unallocated claims expenses”. They are operating costs of the business which are necessary to partake in the insurance industry. They will be already included in monthly premiums that all who take out a policy pay.

They are unallocated claims expenses because you cannot tie the cost back to a single claim and as such you cannot recover them from the third party and also typically not from reinsurance either. If you have a a 50% quota share reinsurance treaty where you pay over 50% of your premium and recover 50% of your claims from your reinsurer this can cause challenges if your unallocated claims costs are too high. 

In principle yes, because they are unallocated they have to be covered by the premiums though as noted if you are buying large quota shares this can be problematic unless you can negotiate a generous ceding commission.

tifo

"Now that it has been agreed we are not at fault we seemingly are unable to get any of the money back from the increased premium".

In my 35 years of driving i've NEVER seen anyone reclaim any previously increased premium due to a non fault accident. Insurers simply won't tell you.

Even with a non fault accident future premiums will increase as you're now a greater risk on the road.