We’ve all seen it. The unlucky passenger in a recovery truck with their own transport secured by nylon belts on the back. All the more common during the Winter months, and you can bet that the sad, slow ride home via a local garage has been preceded by a couple of hours waiting in miserable weather, for the breakdown service to finally show up. Continue reading
New legislation is due to come in at the end of this month in a bid to further reduce the number of uninsured drivers on the UK’s roads. As of July, it will be the responsibility of the vehicle’s registered keeper to insure the vehicle, and they can be penalised if they do not do so, regardless of whether anyone is caught driving it or not. This is a different approach from previous times, where it was the driver who would be penalised, and only if actually caught driving the vehicle. With the advent of number plate recognition technology and police powers to confiscate a vehicle if it was believed to be uninsured, the number of uninsured drivers on the road has dropped by over half, but that still leaves roughly 1 in every 20 vehicles on the road. Continue reading
Or is that really the case? After a catastrophic event, plenty of insured businesses still go under or suffer insurmountable problems, but why is this? Continue reading
After the recent floods in Hull, it came to light, that a lot of householders were significantly underinsured. In fact a large proportion of householders weren’t even insured at all. For those who were council tenants, at least they still have a roof over their head, but for those who weren’t, the flood was just the start of their problems.
You may feel some sympathy, but you also may be feeling slightly smug that you’re clever enough to have adequate home insurance for your needs – but have you? Continue reading
STOP PRESS: Update – 1/3/2011 – The European Court of Justice has ruled that basing premiums on gender is in fact sex discrimination. BBC report here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12606610 The ruling will come into effect in December 2012. – end of update
There’s been a lot of tosh talked about this in the news lately. Here’s a quick link to a BBC article about the European Court of Justice, which is currently considering whether basing insurance premiums on gender is discriminatory.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12586980
There have been many articles about this and a lot of people have been venting their feelings about how this would affect them, and it seems to be a case of the media going along with these general ideas too, but some of the points raised are just plain wrong. Continue reading
After watching the “One Show” on the BBC tonight, I had to put down some words. Dom Littlewood presented a piece about how motor manufacturers publish all sorts of figures such as 0-60 times and mpg figures, but no-one publishes braking figures, which he believes are surely one of the most important safety aspects of a car’s performance.