That depends who you are asking

It's that time of year once again. Time for the car insurance renewal.








Unfortunately, as a sub-23-year old single male, I'm public enemy number one in the eyes of the motor insurance industry as so finding an insurer that will actually honour their advertising claims of "cheap" car insurance is a nigh-on futile task, even with four years without claiming.

But nevertheless, the law requires me to pay for a piece of paper which only has any value in a moment of crass stupidity on my part.

As you can imagine, I'm subject to all the "young driver excesses" that any insurance company feels free to make up on the spot which makes claiming anything a completely pointless exercise. If I do claim, I have to pay the bulk of the costs out of my own pocket anyway and I'll be forced to pay for the rest next year by way of an increased premium. It's a sort of legalised blackmail that works very well in the insurance industry.

But anyway, the renewal note came through with a revised premium of around £381, which wasn't all that bad and around £80 less than last year.

Now in the past as this point, you would go to your local broker and accept any randomly generated number as "his best possible price that he could do if you bought today" or spend a whole afternoon phoning every listing in the Yellow Pages for numbers even more random that you'd be better off asking your newsagent for a 'Luck Dip'.

But the Internet is now here and thanks to other random number generators like Confused and Money Supermarket, I can do it all in one go and, if I'm lucky, pay a hidden middle-man affiliate fee that nobody cares to mention.

A search on both sides revealed a "best price" that was about the same as the renewal but did miss off a few insurers who don't want to be associated with these comparison sites, so I tried those.

One site offered me a "special online price with 10% online discount" of £568, so they were quickly discarded. Another site, who promised to "beat your renewal quote if you have 4 years NCB, even if you aren't very posh" didn't beat my renewal quote. Instead, the tried to triple it.

Resigned to defeat, I tried an online quote with my current insurer and sure enough, I was quoted the "brand new customers only" price of £331. Knowing that I'd have to change the occupation listed on my current documents anyway, I phoned said insurer.

Now I would think that changing my occupation from "care-free, careless student" to "upstanding professional" would have seen a welcome drop, not a £16 increase and so before I knew it, I was passed onto the "Internet quote team" to get the "brand new customers only, but also existing customers if you ask nicely" price.

The annoying thing though, is that for all these various names in the motor insurance industry, they are, on the whole, the same company. Three insurers I obtained quotes from (including the one I went with), were all the same insurer once you get past the marketing yet offered three prices ranging from £331 to nigh-on £1000. For others, the difference was even greater and those that claim to "specialise in younger drivers" were amongst the worst of the bunch.

Never mind eh, there's always next year.

Uninformed Technology

The Times have been carrying a few pieces this weekend about how our roads are very dangerous places to be.






In the UK, we all vehicles have to display a small disc in the corner of the windscreen which, for cars, can cost anything between £50 (discounting exempt cars) and £215 a year depending on how much your vehicle harms the local wildlife.

But last year, almost 2.2million people, twice as many as two years ago, didn't bother to purchase the said disc. Now ordinarily, that wouldn't be that big a deal. The only people that would be harmed is HM tax man, and we've got no sympathy for him.
But when it comes to car tax, it becomes a bit more serious. The problem with that is that the tax disc is the primary, ney, only method of proving that a vehicle is insured and has undergone an MOT where necessary, meaning that if there's 2million vehicles that aren't registered and taxed on the DVLA database, then there's probably more than 2million uninsured drivers on our roads as well.

That's bad news for the likes of you and me, who are thought to pay an extra £30 on our premiums to cover for claims involving uninsured motorists and it's even worse news if you're rear-ended by one of the aforementioned group.

But why the increase? Simply, there are less traffic police officers on our highways and byways. Less officers means less chance of getting caught and goes some way to explaining recent rises in drink driving incidents convictions as well. Reduce the chance of getting caught and you immediately reduce the risk.
The Government defends this by saying that technology is able to reduce the workload of traffic officers, and by 'technology', they mean speed cameras, and that this allows them to be deployed elsewhere.

They perhaps haven't realised the pit-falls of such a scheme. Such technology relies on information. Every legally registered car is on a database in Swansea.
So lets say you are photographed by a so-called "safety camera". The camera takes a photograph of your motor and it's unique ID number. Some bloke then comes along, empties the camera film and punches that number into a super-secret computer. The computer then gleefully spits out your name, address and various other nuggets of information about you and your car. The £60 fine is sent out to you - job done.

But take your unregistered cars. Type that number into the same super-secret computer and it'll knock it straight back. The offender gets then gets away with not only driving an illegal vehicle, but also the traffic offence.

The powers that be are determined to tackle the problem and have announced 'new technology' to catch out the offenders, so lets simplify this:
They have information that is flawed...... which means that the technology doesn't work..... so they bring in new technology..... but the new technology relies on information..... but the information is...... Oh I give up!

We all Hate Insurance Firms

We all hate Insurance firms. Not content with parting us from our hard-earned for something we really don't want to pay for, irritating us night and day with television adverts only margnially better than those for debt management and bombarding us with junk mail, they're now wanting more money from us.

Following the recent trend set by gas and electricity firms, Motor Insurance companies are jumping on the price-hike bandwagon.

Norwich Union from next year will increase their prices in 2007 by an average of 16%, with prices for the high-risk groups inflating by around 40%.

I write this as someone who is currently getting quotes ranging from over £850 to more than £3200 to insure a 2002 1.1l Citroen Saxo, despite already having two years of claim-free motoring. This is because I am in the unfortunate position of being a 20-year-old male, which makes me public enemy number one in the eyes of Britain's insurers.

The problem is, this price rises seem a little bit short-sighted. Whilst I'm fully aware that insurance firms, like all businesses, are only interested in lining the pockets of themselves and their shareholders, it just seems stupid to announce this, although they seem to think that they are meerly leading a pack which will soon follow.

Amongst the reasons cited for the rise by Norwich Union, is the increase in claim processing costs, due to the presence of around 1million uninsured drivers on our roads.
The problem is, that these uninsured drivers are likely to be the young drivers, those on low income or those with bad driving records, who are being priced out of insurance in the first place. With increases like of 40% for these groups, surely this figure is going to rise much higher than the current one million? That means that in one/two years time, claim costs are going to rise yet again, and I'll probably writing a similar piece in the not-to distant future.

Is Norwich Union seeing something that I arn't?