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Driving without insurance . Not informed by insurance company

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  • Driving without insurance . Not informed by insurance company

    About 3 weeks ago I was pulled over outside my own home coming home from work. I was made to get in the back of the police car and informed I had no insurance for my work van. I knew this to be incorrect and gave them the name of the insurers. They rang the insurers and were told that on December 16th the insurers had tried to take payment but the card was declined. I thought there had been some kind of mix up and my wife rang them herself. It was true they had tried unsuccessfully to take payment.
    The police seized my van, issued me with a summons saying I would be fined 300 with 6 points. Devasting news for someone who has never even had a parking fine in 40 years! We rang the insurers back and asked them to arrange new insurance as I needed to get my van for work, only to be told by a youth 'oh our insurers won't touch you with a barge pole now',
    bearing in mind we have been on automatic renewal with them for some years.
    We did get new insurance and paid 150 to get the van from the compound. It occurred to us why had no one contacted us to say the card had been declined (the company had been taken over so new cards issued) and also the police and the new insurers were quite shocked that we had not been contacted. We decided to contact the insurers again and ask them this. Actually spoke to a very sympathetic lady who gave us her name and log on details and she told us 'normally we would write to customers and tell them their card had been declined but December to March are our busiest times so we are not allowed to. Sometimes we send a text but we only have your landline number! ' quite unbelievable I think.

    With this information I thought I would go to a solicitor. The first one said you are wasting your time and the next 2 wanted £1500 . I really didn't have this kind of money to risk do I decided to pay the fine and take the points. At this point I hadn't realised the implications of getting more insurance on my own vehicle once points on licence.

    my wife wrote a letter of complaint to the insurers, and finished it by saying we would go to the Ombudsman.

    They rang me very apologetic, saying in view of this feedback they are changing their way of working and a letter is in the post. The letter has now come and it has a headed from them stating that I was insured on the day I was stopped for that 24 hours.

    Intially I thought there were insuring me again as a gesture of goodwill and that the date showing only one day was an error so I rang them. They just said send that off to the MIB and you will be fine. The will refund your £300 and quash the points. I really don't understand this. Do you know how this works. What sort of letter would I send to the MIB. I thought the Dvla dealt with this sort of thing.

    any advice would be greatly appreciated
    Tags: None

  • #2
    Re: Driving without insurance . Not informed by insurance company

    HI and welcome
    I'm afraid you will have great difficulty geting those points removed, because by accepting the FPN you have admitted guilt.

    From your post I assume you placed your insurance through an intermediary.
    Are you saying that your actual insurers failed to tell you that your insurance was to be cancelled due to non payment of premium? or was it the intermediary?

    Somewhere your policy wording will set out the terms for cancellation of your policy by the insurer.
    It is commonly a seven day notice recorded to your last known address., but not always.

    I suggest you dig out that old policy wording and see if they complied with the contract wording.

    Depending on what you discover you might find initiatig a county court action more fruitful than the ombudsman!

    In the meantime WRITE notes about all you can remember of those various telephone conversations.

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Driving without insurance . Not informed by insurance company

      Hi thank you for your reply.

      I placed the insurance through One Call who are brokers . We were on automatic renewal for the insurance and they were going to renew it for us which we agreed to .

      one Call tried to take payment but due to a change of credit card it was declined.
      They never made any kind of contact in anyway to tell us. The reason for this was it was their busiest time of the year so they dont send out letters.

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Driving without insurance . Not informed by insurance company

        I'm afraid you can probably do nothing about the points on your licence.
        Driving uninsured is an absolute liaility offence, and by accepting the FPN you have pleaded guilty and can't now go back and plead mitgating circumstances (which you could have done if you had elected for a court hearing)

        Regarding the monetary losses you can approach this two ways
        1) via ombudsman, who if he finds in your favour will order the insurers to pay you compensation
        2) via county court claim for possible breach of contract. To win here you will need to find the terms & conditions of the automatic renewal agreement &/or the cancellation terms of your insurers policy wording. You will then need to show they were breached.

        We know that Onecall did not notify you. If you want to sue you need to show they or the Insurers breached their T&Cs

        Comment

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