06/sep/2019
Drivers risk paying hundreds of pounds more than they need to for car insurance due to a number of quirks in how insurers and comparison websites collect data, according to an investigation.
Differences between questions asked by car insurance comparison sites and individual insurers – and the resulting assumptions made by the insurers – can substantially inflate premiums offered to drivers, warns consumer group Which?.
In one scenario, seemingly small variations led to a motorist being quoted more than £200 extra because an insurer wrongly assumed they had made a claim for damage to their vehicle.
When using a comparison site to buy car insurance, drivers are asked a single set of questions agreed by the insurers on the panel rather than answering each insurer’s unique set of application questions.
This can lead to insurers gathering slightly different information about drivers to base their prices on than they would using their own questions, with two insurers confirming this can lead to different prices being quoted for the same person.
Examples include information about dashcams. While some insurers offer discounts of as much as 15 per cent for dashcam owners, only one of the four major comparison sites gave drivers the chance to specify whether they owned one or not.
Differences between questions asked by car insurance comparison sites and individual insurers – and the resulting assumptions made by the insurers – can substantially inflate premiums offered to drivers, warns consumer group Which?.
In one scenario, seemingly small variations led to a motorist being quoted more than £200 extra because an insurer wrongly assumed they had made a claim for damage to their vehicle. TOP ARTICLES5/5’Great British Bake Off’, series10, episode three, review: A great episode, that is, dare I say, the best thing since sliced bread
When using a comparison site to buy car insurance, drivers are asked a single set of questions agreed by the insurers on the panel rather than answering each insurer’s unique set of application questions.
This can lead to insurers gathering slightly different information about drivers to base their prices on than they would using their own questions, with two insurers confirming this can lead to different prices being quoted for the same person.
Examples include information about dashcams. While some insurers offer discounts of as much as 15 per cent for dashcam owners, only one of the four major comparison sites gave drivers the chance to specify whether they owned one or not.
Meanwhile, although it’s compulsory to declare all recent driving incidents, not all comparison sites let you specify which, if any, led to insurance claims, so some insurers make incorrect assumptions.
Which? found that Confused.com and MoneySuperMarket did not let drivers specify whether they had claimed on a reported incident.
Which? tested a scenario using both sites, where a south London-based driver had recently damaged his car but had not claimed for the repairs. When checking the assumptions made by the insurers offering the 10 cheapest quotes using these two comparison websites, two insurers – Hastings Direct and Churchill – wrongly guessed the driver had made a claim, and factored this into the premiums they quoted.
When corrected, Hastings Direct lowered its quoted price by £10, and Churchill lowered the premium by £207 – more than a quarter of the initial quote.
“When a customer is purchasing an insurance policy they are expected to declare any incident, accident or claim regardless of fault, in order for the premium to be generated,” Hastings Direct responded.
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