One thing that van drivers are not scrimping on as thought may be the case this year is the level of their van insurance cover. One of the obvious cost-savings for many sole-traders and small businesses would have been to drop their existing comprehensive policies in favour of third party, fire and theft or third party only, but that’s just not happening.
According to Swinton, who published the results a little under a week ago, many van drivers have actually enquired about a downgraded policy but, after weighing up the pros and cons, 93% who asked the questions about the cheaper alternative have stuck to their guns and renewed their fully comprehensive van insurance.
That has contributed to the company seeing seven out of ten van drivers in all going for optimum cover, based on the nett results of their brief van insurance survey. In a manner of speaking, this figure actually contradicts the outcome of the same insurer’s survey of van driver skills earlier in the month.
Why? Well, fully comprehensive van insurance covers you for any damage to yours and other vehicles (and the drivers) as a result of an incident, even if you are found to be at fault, whereas third party only covers the van, its driver and its contents who were not at fault – if that is not you, then you are not insured. The results of the earlier survey attested to van drivers – mainly young ones – almost believing they were infallible on the road. If that were truly the case, one would imagine that the majority of policies taken out by van drivers – if their self-assessed driving skills are to be believed – would see them only taking out cheaper third party only or third party, fire and theft cover.
Whatever the case, Phil Moss, the insurer’s commercial vehicle manager, commended his customer base for their beliefs and finding that little bit extra, even though times are tough. He went on to point out that, although third party only may be the lowest point of legal entry onto UK roads and is therefore the cheapest van insurance policy on the market, if a van is stolen or you are proven to be at fault in a road traffic accident, it could end up costing a lot more than the difference between fully comp and third party van insurance policies.
To find out how much you could benefit from either upgrading your existing third party policy or switching your existing fully comp van cover to one of our 60 cheap van insurance providers, compare from brokers and direct insurance firms using our online form.