Reducing the Cost of Motor Insurance
September 16, 2011 Uncategorized
All UK drivers could find themselves £120 a year better off following an announcement this week.
At the moment, despite the fact that the British have the lowest number of road crashes in Europe, we have four times the number of whiplash injury claims than any other country in Europe – so why is this?
Well we certainly don’t have weaker necks than our European cousins, what we do have though is ambulance chasing personal injury claims lawyers. The car insurers even get in on the act too by claiming ‘referral fees’ for telling these no win no fee law firms about any accidents we have so that they can then hound us with texts and phone calls begging us to choose them for our no win no fee law suit against the other party.
The additional cost of legal fees adds to each insurance claim by around £2,100, and this extra cost is passed on to us motorists in the form of higher premiums. This means that every year we’re footing the bill for all these no win no fee claims and paying around £120 a year extra which is a lot of money.
Car insurance premiums (what we pay) have gone up by so much over the last two years and a large proportion of that is due to this compensation culture that’s gone mad.
Justice secretary Kenneth Clarke has just announced however that he intends to change the law to stop the “merry-go-round of questionable car insurance claims” he went on to say that injury claimants are “passed around like a commodity to the highest bidder” and that the compensation culture is having a negative effect on society with people being encouraged to play up injuries they may have received explaining the reason the UK has so many more whiplash claims than the rest of Europe. In fact in the UK 8 out of 10 personal injury claims are for whiplash!
Banning car insurers from receiving referral fees will be bad news for all those lawyers and insurers, but is good news indeed for the motorist who is safe on the road, and for anyone who despises the compensation culture.
Lets hope that Mr Clarke’s change in the law will save us all money and stop the greedy insurers and ambulance chasing lawyers in their tracks.
Other dodgy practices that may be driving up the cost of motor insurance include uninsured drivers who add around £30 a year to each of our policies, and insurance fraud which adds around £44. With the new laws that came out in June making it an offence to own an uninsured vehicle even if it’s not driven, we can hope to see this figure beginning to drop over the next few years. The motoring industry is also gearing up to tackle things like staged motor accidents too which should again help reduce the cost of all our motoring policies.