Protected No claims

I'm asking on behalf of a colleague Honest.

She has a 1.6 Mazda GS2 (a little hatch back) and changed insurers last year after going on confusedotcom. Her initial cheaper renewal proved to be short lived as when she sent proof of no claims they said she had failed to report a 3 year old claim and increased the price.

She never said anything about that until just now when she was getting confuseddotcom quotes for this years renewal and I asked why they were so expensive - C£380.00. The thing that surprises me is that she had protected no claims at the time of the claim, and has paid for same ever since. Does the protected no claims not transfer if you change insurance provider?

Should she have argued her case when they asked for the increase in premium? Should she be stating max no claims now or reporting the claim?

I dunno - do you?

A claim is a claim regardless of blame, regardless of cost and regardless of whether protected no claims bonus was in force at the time. Even if the claim was made under a different policy, you as a driver have to declare all claims you have had. So even if a claim was under your company car policy or whilst you were a driver under your friends insurance it still has to be advised to your own insurance company.

So in respect of your friend the claim MUST be declared, although some insurers will only take into account claims within the last 3 years, some will want to know about claims within the last 5 years, but it still have to be disclosed. All claims can affect the rating of the policy and therefore can result in additional charges.

Failure to disclose information can result in a policy being withdrawn, this not only goes for accidents/claims but convictions, modifications, basically all information and should any information change during the course of the insurance you must notify the insurers immediately.
In some situations changes can result in the policy no longer being acceptable to the insurers, which means insurance being cancelled, you don't want to find this out after you have had a claim and the claim be thrown out. In your friends case the information resulted in an additional charge being paid, if the information had come to light after a claim had occurred the insurers may of not honoured the claim due to 'non-disclosure', which could of been very costly for your friend, plus a No Insurance Driving Conviction.

She should also advise the insurers that the policy was protected at the time of the claim, so she didn't actually lose her no claims bonus.

In respect of the actual protected no claims bonus side of things I would recommend she read the appropriate section in the insurers policy wording/policy booklet regarding how this works, as all insurers are different and you should check the scale with any potential new insurer as well. Basically the easiest way to try and explain it is think of Protected No Claims Bonus as 'lives' and in the event of a claim you 'lose a life'. Protected No Claims bonus should be transferrable from insurer to insurer, but they don't all offer the same amount of 'lives'. I don't really want to go into discussion about how each insurers Protected No Claims Bonus works, as like I said they can be different, but you must bear in mind that insurers don't have to honour protection offered with another insurer.

Hope this helps

Regards
Sarah

That's great Sarah thanks. I'll pass that on using the powers of copy and paste. I'l tell her to give you guy's a call too