Whoa ho ho - the sneaky sods! They are twisting an existing law in a way that it cannot be twisted. It comes down to the ways in which an insurance company can provide indemnity: repair, replace, reimburse and reinstate. If you are not happy with the others options you can always ask for a cash settlement. However if you ask for a cash settlement then the insurer is only required to pay you what they would have to pay. So say Insurax (my made up insurance company) has a deal with Currys to get 30% off of electrical items because they put so much business their way. You lose your laptop (costs £1000), and Insurax says here's a replacement from Curry's (retails for £1000, but bought by nsurax for £700 as they have a deal). If you say "I don't want the laptop I want cash" then Insurax only have to give you the £700. They are allowed to do this because they fulfilled their obligations in providing the indemnity by offering you a replacement. If you choose not to accept this for cash then they should not be penalised for it. But guess what they are not allowed to do... that's right - they are not allowed to just offer you a discounted cash price! That's because the offer of cash would not pay for a replacement, so they have not fulfilled their end of the contract. It only works if you insist on cash INSTEAD of the option they have provided. So they are not within their rights to settle on this amount, because actually there are very few 'rights' where this is concerned (which is why these often end up in litigation battles in court). Did you accept the £540 as the payment? It's trickier if you did because that may have shown your acceptance of the offer. Also check your policy documentation to see if it states that your bumper was excluded from cover. However I do believe that they are liable to make your vehicle road worthy - whether it is "economical" to them or not, whatever that bull**** is supposed to mean.

Me for one. It's not the way insurance works, is intended to work, or is ever presented to the customer. Insurance is all about mitigating risk, and peace of mind. There is always a risk that something bad can happen, and the point of insurance is to make sure that you do not suffer a loss all in one go. I'll use a hypothetical and simple example to explain what I mean here. Say that you are in a risk category that means that your house will get flooded on average once every 50 years, and this flood will cost you £10,000. Now nobody knows just when this will occur. To simplify that math let's say this this means that every year there is a 2% chance of it happening. Now 2% of £10,000 is £200, so the insurer will charge you a premium of around £300 (the £100 is mostly made up of commission to the broker, covering expenses, paying reinsurance, with around 2%-5% being actual profit to the insurance company). This will mean that over a 50 year period the insurer will break even. Now you could go 40 years without making a claim, or you could make 2 claims in 2 years - it's all about luck. The point is what is better? Losing that £10,000 slowly at £200 a year, or losing all £10,000 at once in a big lump sum at some random point in that 50 year period. What it is like is gambling in reverse. You are betting that you will have to make a claim. So (to simplify) you have a prize pot (which is the value of what you own), you have the odds (which are set by the insurance company) and that gives you a stake that you must pay. What it is NOT like is a bank that you pay into to withdraw at some point in the future. Every year you take out insurance you are making a one year gamble. You wouldn't go down the bookies and say "hey I've been gambling here for 20 years and never won anything, it's about time you let me win so i can get my money back". The problem is that this attitude of being owed costs everyone else a lot of cash. Because there is very little an insurance company can do to recognise who has this attitude and who does not (you're certinaly not going to admit to it when buying insurance!). So because, like anything else in insurance, we cannot identify where the risk lies we have no choice but to spread it out to everyone. And that is why people who commit insurance fraud cost you money reorete.

However all of this *should* have been explained to the policyholder at inception of the policy.

Shandoli - I think it is worth your father sending them a Subject Access Request to find out all of the data. In particular you are looking to see what they have recorded for payment received. Make that clear in the letter you send, so say something like: All data about me In particular please show all information about any payments received, including but not limited to date and time of payment as well as amount. You need this in order to work out what the *total* cost (ie this outstanding £164 they are claiming for + any payments made). If they give back all the payments you are expecting to see then you can ask them how the total cost of the policy to you would be £164+£155 = £309, when that figure is not listed anywhere in their documentation. ----------- feylin I'm a little confused by your post, and what exactly has happened. Could you please retell us what happened in more detail? In particular: What letters did they ignore? Did you state any as a complaint? FYI a complaint can be given either verbally or by fax/email. Did you agree to take out the policy and then not sign the credit agreement? Or did you never take out the policy? What form did you not return to them? What was their reason why you should be charged extra? Was this extra £10 a one off fee or a monthly increase? What methods have you tried to cancel the policy?

gyzmo is dead right on this one. It's a bloody pain to have to repeat things all the time, and on priniple you would be right to expect a better service. However my opinion is that even if it is annoying, anything that helps you get what you want as quickly as you can is worthwhile doing. I agree on the complaint point as well. Even tho insurers are bound to answer in a certain time the regulatory authorities are not nearly as hard on them as they are for missing the deadline of responding to a complaint. It's sad but it's almost like it's worth making any request a formal complaint these days just to get some action going +edit It's also worth a couple quid to send this all recorded delivery. That way they can't 'not have received' it.

Actually that's an interesting and quite technical point. If I have understood correctly your argument is this. You have a vehicle worth £1500. The vehicle is involved in an accident. You claim on the insurance, and the insurer is due to put you back into the same position as you were before the accident. The vehicle is involved in another accident. The current insurer value it at £1200 because of the previous repairs undertaken. So either: (a) The current insurer is undervaluing the car, or (b) The previous insurer did not return you to the condition prior to the first accident. This is a tricky one as it leaves you £300 down wondering who to claim it from. I would ask for the loss adjuster's report of the condition of the vehicle, and ask them to explain explicitly what parts of that report made them decide to reduce their assessment of the value of the vehicle. Either they can't provide justification of their valuation or they have to provide evidence you can use against your first insurer. Anyone know of a precedent for this?

I'm most of all interested in answering one of your first questions - why should the OP be concerned about this whiplash claim? The reason is one of those rare animals - a statistic about insurance that is actually true! The one I refer to is the estimation that fraud costs the average motorist £40 a year in premium increases. Insurance companies knows that it occurs, try to stop it, and we know that's it's not really fair for the average person to brunt the cost of these criminals, but these costs do get passed on. What's very hard is the pervading attitude that people have a right to inflate a claim, that it's ok to try it on with a whiplash because everyone does it. People who do this are taking cash from your pocket. This is why we all, even you, should care.

Why do you think this is accidental damage? Did you fall onto the rail and break it? What exactly was damaged? What do you want to claim for?

If you make a claim, and 100% of the cost is covered by a third party then it is a no fault claim, as opposed to a fault claim. Almost all insurance products will not penalise you in the case of your first no-fault claim (it is in their interest to assess your risk correctly, as if they overstate your risk they will lose the business to someone else). It is common practice to ignore any rate loadings for up to 2 no fault claims. After that and the judgement is that there is something about the way you drive that makes other people hit you So there is a very strong chance that you will not be penalised in your NCD if you can get the blame removed from you. Sadly it is common practice (in order to speed up claims to reduce expenses, and to lower legal expenses) for many insurers to have agreements with each other that over the course of a year they will have equal number of claims against each other, so let's just call everything 50/50. Terrible practice imo, and I hope it gets banned soon. Definitely put up a fight to start with. If it comes to court then think carefully - even with judicial precedence blame allocation can be a lottery in the courts. But exhaust the complaints procedure / FOS routes first.

I am assuming that the outstanding balance is the full year's premium, at £340 + the interest rate on monthly payments. They are refunding £254.32 of this premium, which means that you are liable for about £130.67 difference, ie the time that you have had insurance covered for. This is 66% of the amount refunded, equivalent to 8 months. Now it gets tricky because by cancelling you are effectively not borrowing all that money to pay monthly (pay monthly is actually a loan to pay the full amount and not month by month cover), or if in reverse then it is early repayment. That means less interest to be paid. It's the only way I can see why it isn't 9 months of repayment. Now this is fine as of the £130.67 that you should have paid you have actually paid £155, or overpaid by £25, so it doesn't seem like they are pulling a fast one there, just being confusing. Now if you take everything else to be correct it seems like the total amount that you owe them for this policy is correct at £164.82. However you have already paid £155, so it looks to me like you owe them an additional £10.

If the fault of non-disclosure lies with the agent, and not the cutomer (as the OP explained) then the customer is not liable for the difference in premium as he may not have purchased that policy at the higher premium. A quote is a quote - if they get it wrong, tough luck to them. If the agent got it wrong, then they are liable for mis-selling. If you would not even have been offered the policy as it does not meet their underwriting criteria then nothing has changed. The insurance company still has to insure you - they are not allowed to cancel the insurance (among other things that would mean you'd have to answer yes to the question of having insurance cancelled which would **** you over properly). In fact if the policy were full cycle they would even have to give you a renewal quote.

To the OP - what was the recorded mileage of the van when you bought it / it was last MOT'd? My thinking is that if you, say, have a 20 mile round trip to work = 100 miles a week = 2600 miles in 6 months, and since that time you had only driven it, say, 600 miles it would be very easy for you to prove that you could not have used it to go to work every day. This would mean that you would have needed alternative transport. Not sure what your job is, but do they have car park security cameras? Do you have colleagues that can witness that you drove the car to work? I agree that it is not your responsibility to prove that you are not fronting, but my feeling is that if there is something simple you can do to prove your case then it will get the claim settled a lot quicker. --- sang - what information was or was not collected is immaterial as long as everything you said was true anything omitted does not make the slightest bit of difference. These 'fronts' as you call them (or brokers as they are more correctly termed) can ask any questions they like that they feel is material to the risk of the policy. They cannot just ask anything because the underwriting company would need to prove a statistical basis for that question should any complaints occur (this is why they can rate on your age despite the age discrimination act). The information you provide is then run against a number of products. Now these products can be very very different. For example one might rate on whether you smoke or not (risk of fire), another product may not have this question. If the product does not have this question then they cannot come back at a later date and state that because you smoke they won't cover you, even if they can prove that this makes you more risky. If, say, you put that you were a smoker into the website then all policies that declined you for smoking should not be available. If one is available then it is not your fault, it is the fault of the broker as they have mis-sold you insurance cover. This is serious business, but you are protected because the blame does not lie with you. However you do need to be very very careful about what exactly you are buying. Never purchase insurance without carefully reading the policy wording (and plenty of people here will help explain anything ticky to you). Sadly the days of internet selling has made the process all too automatic, and many people just rush through it without realising there can be big difference in what you are buying. --- Fronting is a very difficult to detect type of insurance fraud. It is where you lie about who is the main driver in order to alter the level of risk in order to drive a lower premium. They would need to prove that a riskier named driver used the vehicle more than the main driver in order to prove that fronting has occurred. I know it is frustrating, and it is wrong of the insurance company to lie to you, but I'm going to be a bit sympathetic to them for deciding to investigate you. Fronting occurs a huge amount, and it costs a lot of money. And it's not the insurance company that ends up paying for it because thye just raise their prices - it is innocent people who end up paying for it. Don't take it personally, because it isn't personal. They are not accusing you of this, they are investigating it. And it happens a hell of a lot so don't feel that you are being singled out. Just tell the truth to the investigator and you should have nothing to fear. If you can find anything to support your position then prepare it for that meeting. However if things go slowly after they have not found anything then start to complain like mad!!!

Be careful about accepting cash settlements. Often insurance companies can acquire large discounts for bulk business, and if you demand cash then they only have to pay you the cash amount they would have to pay a supplier. So in theory you could get your man to do the work for £1000. The insurance company's preferred supplier might do it for £1000, but offer a 30% discount to the insurer, meaning that they would only have to pay £700. In this case they need only offer you £700 against what your man would do it for. The only way you could force the insurer to use a different supplier is if you could prove that the quality of the work would be insufficient. To use an extreme example say your window was a stain-glass window and the insurer wanted to use a non-specialist repairer. You could argue that a specialist was needed to insure that the work was done to the correct standard. If your man is cheaper tell your insurer and they will switch to save themselves money. If he is a little more expensive then ask for the cash settlement and pay the difference for the convenience. As for the TV, as correctly stated, make sure you hold out for a similar quality item. Claims departments can be very pressurising. If they are stalling for time or winding you up put in an official complaint. Ask for a copy of their TCF (Treating Customers Fairly) rules to see if they are breaching their own guidelines - which at it's most extreme could result in them having their trading licence removed so it's not something they will take lightly.

It's impossible to put someone back into EXACTLY the position they were in before the claim. Even if you found the same make and model that was 8 years old there is no guarantee that it would not break down a week later due to having a shoddy history. New for old by definition puts you into betterment. The insurer has to put you back into position AT LEAST as good as the one you were in before the incident. Follow Mossy's advice - stand firm and demand something which delivers the same quality as your old TV. Don't go for an estimate / cash alternative as new for old is a much stronger position for you.

My guess is that you are fine (although it is commendable that you have taken early action/advice to head off a potential future issue!). Even if the car needed a full respray at something like 2k, it would cost an insurance company far more than that to process a court claim against your child for negligence which resulted in an accident, and very unlikely for them to win. Also I believe that if your child is under 10 then they cannot be held accountable at all, but I am not 100% on this.

Claims handlers are now being put under more pressure to pressure the customer in the first instance in order to put off fraudulent claims. It's not right, and it's not TCF, but the company I work for has seen a 40% rise in the number of claims reported that are never followed up by the customer - one of the simplest (and bluntest) ways to measure fraud. Insurance companies will also try and delay payment for as long as possible on claims that are not accruing any further cost. For example a car accident where you hire a vehicle will be dealt with very swiftly in order to cut the claim cost down, but a theft claim on fishing gear has no such accruing cost. It is slightly backwards to say that the longer insurance claims take to pay out the more they cost, as this is not the direct link. The more complex a claim the longer it takes to pay and the more that has to be paid. There is a relationship, but not a causal one - they are both effects of the complexity. The longer it takes to pay a claim the longer the insurance company collects interest/investment income on the cash they keep. So there is certainly not a culture of getting on with things - something the TCF regulations are helping to change. To the OP - both are right in saying that it is unrealistic to expect you to have all of your receipts. You have a non-family member as a witness, so fraud is not likely in this case. Good luck!

No, I'm not still paying for the loan. I was made redundant in March 2005, and because of this I went to the bank and asked about making a claim. I was told I could not because I had not been in service at that company for more than 6 months, which made me ineligible to claim. I told them that I could not pay that month because I had no job, and they said to make a payment when I could. I contacted them again shortly before the loan was going to go out to tell them that it would bounce as I did not have enough money to cover it. The next month the same thing happened, with me informing them. The month after I got a job and was able to restart payments, having missed just 2. However they would not take just that one month alone, and they would not negotiate over repayment of arrears. For them it was all 3 months or nothing, and as I did not have the money (it came to over £1000) it ended up as nothing. From this I ended up with a CCJ because they would not give me time to pay. The CCJ was being repaid at £20 a month. They were taking from my account automatically, but stopped in September 2007 when I downgraded my account. I'm sure they have broken several rules, but I don't know how to go about fighting them.

There are 4 things an insurer can do: a) Repair b) Replace c) Offer cash d) Still can never remember but it's not used - last time I posted this some guy told me and i still can never bloody remember!!! So a) is not applicable in this case. b) Is unlikely because they would need to replace the exact same ring. Same shape, same carat, same blemish of diamond (within reasonable standards). However if you were to buy your ring from a high street chain and this was a regular line that could be replaced then the insurer could do so. Sentimentality has no material value here so some people would prefer to get the cash, which is something that they are entitled to do. This is where option c) comes in. Now if they offer cash then they have to offer the full amount of the replacement value of the item. However a very technical point is that if they can replace the item and you ask for the cash instead then they are only entitled to offer you the cash that they would have spent to replace the item. If they cannot replace the item then they cannot offer you anything but the value of what was lost. If they can replace it but you prefer cash then they only have to offer as much cash as they would have had to pay to replace the item. This is very common with things like laptops, which are abundant and can be easily replaced because lots of each model are made. Insurers can get a discount by providing business, and this is a good thing because it lowers costs and reduces premiums. Now if you had your laptop damaged/stolen and wanted it replaced with the same model it would be unfair of you to ask for £500 to buy it from Curry's when the insurer can get it from Maplins for £400. This is much harder to do for bespoke jewellery, but it seems like NU's claims people are on the case here for you. As to the valuation rising this is a common thing to do within the insurance industry to ensure that your are not under-insured, and is called Index linking. Every month we get information from the government to see what material prices are doing in order to work out the change in value of things like rebuilding houses, or the cost of the gold in a ring. When it comes to renewal time a year later the cover of your insurance is automaticaly raised in order to insure that due to inflation you don't make a claim in 5 years time to find out you don't have the right cover. Now this seems like a bit of a [problem] until you hear that this rise in cover comes at no additional charge. This is because it is against the FSA's TCF (treating customers fairly) regulations to provide you with something extra you didn't ask for and then charge you for it (and quite right too!!). However we don't want to hassle customers at renewal time to get more information, so we increase the cover automatically. What it is important to realise is that the cover limit of the item is not the same as the value. If you cover an item up to £3000 and it is only worth a fiver then don't expect to get £3000 if you lose it (not trying to insinuate your ring is worth a fiver, just using an extreme example to show what sort of fraud is occurring these days). The cover is the maximum amount payable, and it is often worth setting this a bit higher in case your item suddenly and unexpectedly increases in value.

Even if the call was not recorded if the other party made any notes about you from the conversation you would be entitled to get a copy of those as well.

Hi All, I took out a loan with Barclays in 2002, and took out PPI because I was told that it would cover me if I lost my job. Well a couple of years later I did lose my job and as a result of not being able to claim because it was mis-sold to me I ended up getting a CCJ off of the loan. The CCJ itself was because I missed 2 payments before I found new work, and was told I had to pay all 3 payments in a lump sum, and they would not take just one installment, it was 3 or nothing, and so in the end it was nothing and as I could not catch up. They would not negotiate etc etc I'm sure you've heard all this before. So I sent them a letter and back in November I get this reply: " Further to your letter regarding your Barclayloan agreement. Unfortunately we are unable to locate this agreement on our system, so are unable to send a copy for your records. " Now I held on because I had also sent out a SAR back in September (by recorded delivery) and was expecting the information soon. It didn't arrive and I sent a demand, they stated they had not received my request but would do it now for no fee...!!! So I picked up the information today, and lo and behold no agreement. So what do I do now? With no agreement I can't prove I was mis-sold the PPI, and I was hoping to use this not only to reclaim PPI charges but also to get the CCJ removed. Any help appreciated!

The first thing to do is to check your insurance policy. There will be a section that will list the cover (financial compensation) that you are entitled to if you have to be rehoused somewhere else. The sad news is that you almost certainly could have stayed at a hostel for a claim such of this instead of having to impose upon your parents. Now assuming that you have the Homecover policy, then according to this link http://www.allianz.co.uk/personal/assets/pdf/new/ACPER0199-6.pdf (page 9, section 14) you are covered for rent you pay or receive, or for reasonable expenses up to 20% of the sum insured value. So if you were covered for, say £100,000 of Buildings damage then you could receive up to £20,000 compensation. So check this first to make sure what your cover is - but Allianz do sell pretty good products so I would assume that you would be more than covered for 6 months away. Now the reason to check this is because if you do work out that you want to claim more than you are covered for then you will have to explain why you are entitled to this extra amount. Your argument will of course be that CL have admitted to unreasonable delays, but then Allianz will charge CL for this loss, and CL will get bitchy about it, so I would not mention this unless you absolutely have to. So the next step is to work out what loss you have received from having to live at your parents. Unfortunately things like 'stress' and 'inconvenience' are very hard to prove, so you will need to go with the monetary figure that you are paying to your parents. So if for example you were paying £400pcm for the last 6 months your claim would be £2,400. Things like providing a rent book as evidence of payments, or a contract for settlement upon payment from the insurance company is a great way to help prove these figures are true. After you have done this then work out anything else than may have been additional cost (extra parking permits, more petrol to get to work etc) and add them in to get to your offer. Don't take the **** but do add in everything you can think of that is reasonable, and make sure to break it down in the offer. If you have to spend an extra £5 a week on extra trips to the supermarket because there is not enough freezer space with your parents then add this in!! Once you have done this then submit your offer to CL. Don't give your full breakdown at this stage: use it later to justify your cost. Just give rent and expenses and the total. If you feel that your house will not be ready soon then it may be worth informing CL that you will be moving into a hotel / renting somewhere. Now depending on what your preferences are this can be more stressful than paying rent to a relative, so think carefully about this. Whatever you do talk to CL in advance - although this is not an uncommon thing to do you want to keep CL on your side with no nasty surprises, and obviously you are not entitled to rent a mansion Finally if you need the cash soon because you are running short (and it's amazing how a change in circumstance can really bite into any reserves you have, plus the last thing you need with all this stress is money worries) then ask for an interim payment. If your total claim was, say, £3000 then an interim payment of something like £500 is very unlikely to be refused. Good luck, and if you have any more questions feel free to ask - there are many users here that are far more involved with the claims process than I am so they may be able to give you more specific advice.

Insurers will either have to replace the frames or give you enough cash to suitably replace the frames. If you cannot provide a receipt (I assume because your wife bought the glasses a fair while ago) then they will try and match an existing frame against your description to come up with an estimated value. At this point they should put an offer to you, and then you will have to decide whether you want to accept it, or refuse it (with a counter-offer and reasons why you believe your offer is more reflective than the offer you were given).

Well again technically they are rigt, but this is a contract between wo parties, and thus they should have read it as well. Stick to your guns - press the compliance officer on why they were allowed to sell a policy that was not allowable, ie two single people requesting Insured and Spouse cover. To give some more information, high street brokers and many telephone brokers use special software to generate the quotes they give you from the information provided. These are handled by companies called Software Houses, who take the rates from the underwriting insurer, package them up and then sell them to brokers to use. In my job i get to access these software packages daily because all the underwriters that use this have an agreement with a company called ISL that make a program called WhatIf? that allows us to test our rates against the market. If I were to enter a quote on WhatIf? using 2 people whose marital status was single, and tried to claim that either they were related as Spouse or tried to get Insured and Spouse cover then all the products would decline or refer, with the reason being that they must be married to be a spouse, and the relationship must be spouse (or civil partnership) to get insured and spouse cover. They do this because they know that such a policy is not enforceable, and the Software Houses actually do a pretty good job of testing things like this to make sure that mistakes don't occur. Now direct sellers don't always have these systems, especially when sold over the internet or when they have their own special panel of underwriters. I don't know what ECar's situation is, but it should give you confidence to know that there are very few companies where mistakes like these can be made with regard to standing up for yourself and saying to ECar that they ballsed it up. Good luck and keep us informed!

Hi there, could you confirm that the £5,000 personal possessions cover was for unspecified personal possessions please? Just need to know if that cover was for items you specifically told them about or not. I suspect it was for unspecified because the £5,000 cover is the normal level for that, but I don't want to make any assumptions. Also what date did you take out that policy on, as Esure have different policies over different times. ---------- Ok assuming I have the right booklet: "Home" is not defined. "House" is defined, as not including garages amongst other things. The FSO also states this in the letter. http://www.esure.com/wcm/groups/public/documents/webcontent/wcmprod_002017.pdf (page 23 - Section 3 'Contents which are temporarily removed from the Home') Excludes loss or damage: caused by theft or attempted theft. However, you are insured for loss or damage caused by theft or attempted theft from any building if this involved forcible and violent entry caused by vandalism or malicious acts. To me it seems like you have a strong case that the tackle was covered (up to £5000) in an outbuilding, as this was not the home. This of course entirely depends upon you only keeping it their temporarily. If you kept it their as the place you stored it when not using it then it could not be covered by the personal possessions cover. If however you normally kept it in your house, but you just moved it out their temporarily for some reason then you would be covered (this would be like taking it over to a mate's house the day before a fishing trip so it is all ready - it has to be a temporary thing to lower the risk, else this cover would not be possible to give).

Hi Jamie, this is a common problem with non-face-to-face transactions where genuine mistakes are made. From a purely 100% technical point of view Esure are correct in saying that you were not covered correctly. However things like this fall into a grey area because obviously the mistake was not huge and so the risk of the cover was not significantly different. As a bit of background, insurance is priced on a purely statistical basis taking into account performance and competitiveness. This is the only way that you can charge different prices for different sexes / ages and not be accused of discrimination (agism is now so illegal that a birthday card sent at work should not have that person's age on them!). However insurance does not stop there and uses a number of other seemingly unrelated rating factors, such as marital status, how long you have had the car, and at one time even what colour it was. Now the reason I am saying this is because usually "Insured and Spouse" policies perform significantly better than either "Insured Only" or "Insured and Named" policies. Last time I was pricing motor insurance we saw that Insured and Spouse was around 10%-15% better than Insured Only, whilst Insured and Named was around 5% worse. Therefore you give a discount. The problem is that if everyone lied to get this discount then the Insurance company would lose money, even if they recovered the lost premium from just those that claim. This is because your insurance is not just to cover you, but to cover everyone else insured by that company. Therefore in order to prevent this they can't just ask for the premium difference, they have to refute the claim. Now sometimes this is done deliberately, and this sort of fraud is thought to add around 20% on to everyone's insurance premium. However sometimes genuine mistakes are made. The problem is that the insurance company cannot tell which is which - and to be honest I don't think they are really interested as if they have a basis to try and refuse a claim they will take it. Your biggest weapon is that your son put both of you as being single. This is not just importnat from an intelligent point of view in you arguing the mistake, but also from a technological point of view. The reason is that their system should in no way accept the relationship as Spouse if both drivers on the policy are Single. There is no way that this can be correct, and the Esure system should either have flagged it up as a mistake and prevented you from doing it, or they should have referred the risk to their underwriting team to investigate. As a further note the FSA are more often than not on the side of the general public than the insurance companies when it comes to a claim like this, where the risk is not significantly different. They state that it is not treating the customer fairly to refuse the entire claim because of small mistakes where deliberate fraud cannot be proven. Now "treating the customer fairly" might seem a bit of a weak statement but it's actually an FSA regualtion that all insurance companies have a TCF set of rules in place which they absolutely 100% have to abide by (or it's big fine time). So to take this forward I would send a letter to Esure's compliance officer. State that it was a genuine mistake which Esure's system should not have allowed to have happened because you cannot have an Insured and Spouse policy where both policyholders are single. Say that by allowing this risk to be written Esure are putting their customers at risk of not being covered due to a genuine mistake, and that this is not treating the customer fairly. I mean imagine if you had hit someone Good luck with this - I'm confident you can get a good response from this. If the compliance officer is no help then you will need to escalate this to the FSO, so let us know what the reply is.