If you have been a van driver for some years, even though you will have made use of your built-up no claims bonus, you will still find the rises in van insurance quotes over the last two years incredulous. You are not alone.
It seems that everyone is being penalised, from young drivers seeking cheap van insurance, women drivers at the end of this year and anyone who’s lost their no claims bonus and perhaps accumulated license points as a result will begrudge paying the super-inflated van insurance quote that not even comparing online cannot curb.
Many reasons have been attributed, resulting in the Office of Fair Trading launching a full-scale investigation into the spiralling costs of motor insurance towards the end of last year. Almost everyone has settled on the fact that it is spurious personal injury claims compensation – whiplash being at the forefront – that has been the driving force behind the continued rise.
And everyone, the PM included, is jumping on the bandwagon, trampling over the no win no fee compensation culture allegedly responsible for the rise in your once-cheap van insurance, but to what effect? What is happening now, after many promises in this last month alone, to tackle the problem?
After another rousing speech this week, we start to see some figures next to the bullet points, but yet to see timelines when these changes will be introduced to the existing system, which has been labelled ‘dysfunctional’ on many levels, several times over this week, already.
The focus on the drive will strike at the heart of the problem – the whiplash injury. Details in one recent report suggest that there are currently 1,500 personal injury claims per day being submitted for this injury, which is very difficult to either prove or disprove. As things stand, the majority of cases are winning their compensation award which, in turn, is driving up the base cost of your car or van insurance policy.
This is even harder to take in as EuroRAP rates Great Britain’s road as the safest in Europe based on risk assessment. And that was backed up by Justine Greening’s suggestion that the UK’s driving was improving, as there are less accidents every time the reports analysing the statistics are released.
In the next article, we will look at exactly what we can expect to see, but we can’t as yet tell you when you’ll see, a return to the cheap van insurance premiums you were once used to.