Insurance company trying it on shock horror !

Weve  done our buildings and contents insurance through Halifax for years bikes included never had to claim anything. Last year price was around £460 renewal letter yesterday £595 !!!!

I phoned them up asked if there had been a mistake as that was around 30% extra she said I could check it online if I wanted  then in the next breath said I can make it £515 if thats better for you !

So just a 5 minute phone call knocks £80 off the price, I guess they rely on people not bothering just shrugging then shoulders and mumbling to themselves.

It’s the same as car insurance.- my last renewal call resulted in two substantial reductions, when I said I was going to go elsewhere.

Especially annoying, as my annual mileage has dropped from 20k to 3k, now that I’m within cycle commuting range.

Heaven for id that the premiums are based on risk.

By the time I call the insurance company after a renewal hike, I’ve usually already been online and signed up with someone else, so I’m just ringing to cancel, which makes their counter offers a bit pointless.

To be fair, this kind of thing is not limited to insurance companies.

Even £460 sounds mad expensive unless you are insuring a fleet of Tour de France super bikes. I smash my details into the Meerkats every year just to be sure.

@tthew that’s not just for the bikes , it’s buildings and contents as well mind .@martinhutch I did that every year but as soon as I start including a £5K EBike it became not worth proceeding.

£5K EBike

Ah, there’s the rub. Our B&C including accidental damage and a few cheap push rods is a couple of hundred quid.

my last renewal call resulted in two substantial reductions, when I said I was going to go elsewhere.

Last time I had this I asked why they hadn’t offered that deal in the renewal letter and despite their best attempts to justify it I cancelled anyway and changed to another insurer

I honestly think this is fraud. Where else do you have goods and services offered to you personally at a price via a unique personal email/letter that is reduced substantially if you call up and query it but without an explicit invitation and explanation that is going to happen…..

Loads of businesses offer dynamic (horrible phrase) but that is an offer to everyone, not just you and it varies by time offered not whether you have decided you aren’t going to pay it or know how to negotiate a reduction or that you can.

If they put your premium up more than inflation and no other circumstances have changed they should have to justify exactly how and why they did that. If they then subsequently knock it back down after a five minute phone call by basically saying ‘oohh I guess you aren’t such an idiot after all, shame but hey can’t blame a company for trying to rip off an existing customer can you’ then they should be fined by the ombudsman and the money spent on pothole repair.

We’d have roads like Germany in 12 months!

scumbags the lot of them.

I honestly think this is fraud.

Anyone who has ever tried to get a full payout on a house insurance policy knows the whole industry is a sham.

Where else do you have goods and services offered to you personally at a price via a unique personal email/letter that is reduced substantially if you call up and query it

How about anglian windows. They did a costing as they were installing over the road. Got a comparative quote from a local glazing company. Almost half price, 10k cheaper. Anglican suddenly able to reduce their quote. They can go sing for it

Also, Virgin Media?

So just a 5 minute phone call knocks £80 off the price, I guess they rely on people not bothering just shrugging then shoulders and mumbling to themselves.

At you age, I would have thought you’d worked this out by now?!?

Every insurance renewal is the same at the moment – as soon as the renewal comes in I sign up with someone else, usually going through Quidco for extra cash back.

The last one was pet insurance which went up by £200, signed up with a different insurance company saved £250 & got £70 cash back.

When ever they ask why are you not renewing, I say due to the unexplained price increase – if they say they can match my new quotes I ask them to put in the notes that’s why I’m leaving.

TBF I do the same with brake down cover – swap between AA and RAC every year, new customer rate each time and significant cash back.

Anyone who has ever tried to get a full payout on a house insurance policy knows the whole industry is a sham.

Insurance is like most other products, to at least some degree, you get what you pay for. If you put your details into Meercats each year, take the cheapest quote and move on then you can expect them to be reluctant to pay claims and offer poor service.

Pay some more to a more reputable business and you’ll get paid and get some service.

By and large, personal lines insurance (household, motor, etc.) is a race to the bottom at a time when the cost of paying out claims is going upwards. Margins are super tight so companies will do what they can to make them better.

Just been through the same pantomime with Admiral.

Premium went up be 8%. Quick phone call and got it reduced by 7%.

It has become a pre-advent tradition, like I’m a Celebrity and Strictly.

Since posting this I’ve got a quote from M and S they are £80 cheaper than the Halifax revised quote and they offer a No Claims Discount for next renewal?But I’m a bit puzzled by the way they value and cover bikes .Regardless how many bikes you have you just put in the value of the most expensive one then all the others are covered to that maximum ? To me that is potentially open to fraud, I’m going to double check that before I go any further.

How about anglian windows. They did a costing as they were installing over the road. Got a comparative quote from a local glazing company. Almost half price,

Slightly off topic, but I was arranging a funeral and part of that was buying some flowers.

I initially went to the co-op as they have an funeral office near me.

Price was extortionate.. So I went with an independent guy for the actual funeral.. And I went to a local Florist, showed them the co-op brochure /price list.. And get this..

They straight up told me they supply flowers to the local co-op funeral services, and said pick what you want from the brochure and we’ll do that or something very similar for a good 40% less!

So that’s what I did.

And all was good.

Where else do you have goods and services offered to you personally at a price via a unique personal email/letter that is reduced substantially if you call up and query it

You’ve never negotiated? It’s a while since I did contract law but any price advertised is an invitation to treat and can go up or down?

It’s a very long while to be fair.

If my current car insurer doesn’t offer me a reasonable renewal price, I switch.

When they ring up at the last minute to ask if there’s anything they can do to stop me leaving I say “yes, you could have offered me this price at the start”.

What’s interesting about this is all the Lloyds Banking Group companies (Lloyds, Bank of Scotland , Halifax and MBNA) say on their websites that they wont negotiate prices by phone or online.  Seems that they will, so I’m calling tomorrow.

My MBNA policy just went up about 10%, not too bad vs previous years, but it’s about time they put up their cover limits in line with their premiums.  Total cycle cover is still limited to £10k even if bikes are individually specified.

Actually, having just got a couple of quotes, what’s way more annoying than being quoted an inflated renewal premium and then knocking it down during a 10 minute phone call is spending 15 minutes filling out an online quote for a new provider, knowing it will almost certainly be declined or referred because you’ve listed 5 bikes.  But obviously you dont find this out until right at the end of the process when you’ve wasted plenty of time answering 100 questions and handed over an equal amount of info.

@agentdagnamit been there done that ! I think insurance companies have been really out of touch regarding how much some bikes cost now . Up until recently I was finding £500 the ceiling for bikes from there they had to be specified then the maximum was only about 2K

Home insurance with natwest, big price increase proposed…2 mins on phone…same price as last year. Their model must assume say 50% just pay it.

You could always employ the services of an insurance broker…let them do the work for you. IANAIB

You could always employ the services of an insurance broker…let them do the work for you. IANAIB

They’ll be getting a nice 30-40% commission

IWAIB

My house insurance renewal came in a month ago. It went from £600 odd to £2,500?

Been dealing with car insurance after my stationary vehicle was driven into. They want to settle 50 – 50?? This is 2 years after the event. Got an email to call them, direct line, and the guy who answered the phone said he was from admiral. Poor lad got a proper ear full.

Filthy scammers and clearly all in cahoots.

MrsRNP rented a shop, the lease basically said we were responsible for the fixtures and fixings but not for the fabric of the building.

Early insurance policy with company A, nothing mentioned about door locks beyond 5 lever requirements.

Renewed policy, company A had sold out to company B. Company B rang MrsRNP to discuss details of policy but said everything identical…….

Few months later drunk guy falls down into courtyard from the adjacent street at night and needs ambulance attention. Some time later letter from solicitor claiming injuries/ £50k compensation.

Shop owner insurance refused to be involved, our insurance sent a loss adjuster to visit who went straight to the back door…………was nice as pie and then left.

Shortly after our insurance wrote to say they were dropping us as clients due to having a non British Standard door lock!

That previous Phone Call had apparently discussed whether our locks were 5 lever to BS standards.

Long story short but we were personally on the hook for £50k, it took a lot of fighting and costs to get our landlords building insurance to take it on.

Our insurance policy forevermore was massively expensive as we had to tick the ‘have you ever been refused insurance’ box.

I also had similar insurance issues on the ‘Surron thread’ so I don’t have a good view of insurance companies.

Since I posted this I’ve remembered something that is probably quite relevant. A few years before COVID our insurers offered a 3 year fixed deal so what you were paying year 1 would be the same year 2 and 3 which was amazing unheard of . The catch was at the end of that deal they hiked the premium by an eye watering amount which I challenged. Their response was well you’ve just had a 3 year fix to which I replied yeah but I don’t remember reading anywhere that you expected to recoup that money in one fell swoop , after some haggling they brought the price down but I reckon they are still trying to recover those savings and more ?

MrsRNP rented a shop,

When was that story from? What year, I mean?

We had a Halifax building and content insurance for years.  It started at about £1k pa and every year it went up c£100 and ended up about £2400.  I thought we had a subsidence thing attached to the building, seems we didnt.  I got it straight down to under £1k.  I complained and they never answered.

@Rich_s

It was ~8 or 9 year ago. Iirc there has been a change to legislation that stopped this type of shithousery nowadays but it didn’t help us at the time.

Insurance Act 2015 was 9 years ago, probably enacted 2016.

But before that there was caselaw about this sort of thing (this is ancient memory, but AGF v Printpak is the one I’m thinking of).

Anyway, it depends on which insurance company it was, did you use a decent broker,  did you go to the ombudsman. All of which may have helped… a decade ago ?

But yes, the IA would help you if the same thing happens today.

Also I read your Surron thread response. Your broker (it’s not an insurance company) sounds rubbish and hasn’t explained things to you.

Whomever the insurer was has – basically – followed current caselaw. What that means is a precedent was set somewhere in court, and if there’s a situation like you describe where a collision happens between a vehicle and a scrote, the vehicle insurer is going to be paying. Maybe just some % of the claim, maybe the whole thing, but definitely paying.

So it would go down on your record as some sort of fault claim.

And, if I may, you said you were manoeuvring so you’re very unlikely to be completely not at fault.

What that means is you’re on the hook for the claim and the insurer would have to take the case to a higher court to change the caselaw. That is expensive and they may have thought your claim was insufficiently novel to try it.

So your insurer paid the claim according to the law as it stands. Hope that helps your understanding a tad.

Rich_S thanks for the reply, that’s as I understood both cases. Scroates have nothing to lose.

The back door lock had nothing to do with the injured party incident but was convenient for our insurance to drop us. It was also the attitude of both loss adjusters in both cases that greatly annoyed me. The shop adjuster was nice as pie “don’t worry we’ve got you covered” but had obviously noted the lock. The Surron adjuster just downright fabricated my statement. It had to be amended numerous times, if I’d have quickly signed it our insurer would have no doubt dropped us on “wears glasses however wasn’t wearing them at the time” or the numerous other incorrect statements.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwyp1z53w0jt

Medical Insurance CEO shot in the street! Maybe look for the person that watched a family member die after the insurance company welched out?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwyp1z53w0jt

Medical Insurance CEO shot in the street! Maybe look for the person that watched a family member die after the insurance company welched out?

I suspect that could be a very long list.