Insurance prangs

In recent years the borderline-criminal activities of the insurance industry has become a national scandal.

Where there should be sympathy for its exposure to fraudsters, there is only hatred from law-abiding citizenry, most of whom sooner or later get exposed to their schysterism.

One growth area has been the wholesale breach of personal privacy by the industry, which is little better than News of the World.

Get in a prang and your insurer sells your details to a gut-bucket lawyer who encourages you to claim further damages, all of which pushes up premiums for everyone. This activity should be banned without delay.

Another growth area is this business of paying for replacement cars while a pranged car gets fixed in the garage. This also caused insurance premiums to rocket, as stupidly expensive cars get hired out while repairs get argued over and eventually carried out.

I propose two things to help curb this unwanted nonsense.

Firstly, there should be the legal right to have insurance that waives the right to a hire car replacement in the event of an accident. In an industry-wide reciprocal arrangement, all such policies would be discounted to exclude costs associated with replacement cars.

Secondly, terms & conditions should be re-written for the remaining policies so that replacement cars would no longer be required to be ‘similar’ (ie: in the price bracket).

The new rule should only require a vehicle of ‘similar capacity’ (or size). The point here being that a £10,000 Fiat Punto actually has a bigger passenger capacity than a £100,000 two-seat sports car.

Given the bad things that happen in the world, having to forsake a luxury motor a few days for more modest wheels seems like a reasonable price to pay so that the rest of us can enjoy lower insurance premiums. I say ‘enjoy’ and ‘lower’ in the loosest sense of the words there, but you get my drift.

I haven’t run the figures to see how much this would save, but I can’t help feeling it would be worthwhile.