I am an ex police officer and I also have a Masters Degree in Criminal Justice Policy. So I know a bit about how these things work. They are hard to read and hard to accept, I know. But there are some things you need to take into account. 1. The insurance company are only interested in settling a claim the cheapest way possible. Carrying out exhaustive investigations is not the way they do things. That would ramp up costs and everyones premiums. 2. The police themselves are only interested in 'evidence.' I know you said that you had witnesses to the incident and that may well be true, and that they have investigated, but the fact remains is that the insurers do not trust that these witnesses are fully independent and it is what they decide which determines what evidence they have. I have no doubt that they are using that as an expediency to keep down costs. It's a bit like the American plea bargaining system they have in place - only it involves pre-trial negotiations over insurance matters. 3. Please bear this in mind because I have found this so infinitely useful. Whenever you are in any disputed situation where it results in a 'he said, she said' situation (never mind who is telling the truth), try to over-ride that with cold hard facts. What are the facts? Those bits of relevant information that form the indisputable part of the story - the bits no one of the parties can dispute. That negates a lot of what is said, felt or believed. The answer is obvious when you look at the 'facts : you have a dispute where one party has said one thing, another has said something else happened. The rest is padding. That equals, in this case, knock for knock as an outcome. Please never, ever confuse 'evidence gathering' and legal justice outcomes with arriving at the 'truth' and the sort of justice that ordinary people call 'justice'. It is simply not the same. These ideals has nothing to do with 'justice', even if it should do. But if it did, emotion would run rampant over rational decision making, and that is not how the legal system or insurance system works. The best 'fact' finding device you can have is a dash cam. No one can argue with that. BTW: I am not being smug at all and I know you are probably feeling furious with reading what I have said. But remember this: I was also involved in a similar situation to yours. Some old codger who, it turned out, was grieving the loss of his wife, backed out of a parking spot and bashed into my car after I had stopped and hooted him to stop too. Just like you had. I got out, just as furious as you were in your situation. Then two women, who sprang out from no-where came to 'HIS' rescue screaming at me that I was at fault and that he was an old man and I should respect the elderly and that they would side with him. Can you believe that? Completely fake witnesses who couldn't possibly have seen what they said they had. I stood no chance. I had no cam, and only one independent witness came to my defense but did not want to be involved further. This meant that I had no official witnesses at all. A classic 'he said, she said' arose and we both resigned ourselves to a knock-for-knock outcome. That is what the insurers would have decided anyway. We both reported the matter and left it at that. What would be point of doing anything else? I ended up paying for my own prang repair which, ideally, HE should have paid for. Facts that legal justice depend on as evidence, has nothing to do with the truth, oughts or shoulds unless it doesn't interfere with these. Remember that and you will find these situations, albeit it slightly, more bearable. Life stinks sometimes, doesn't it?

Don't get me started on Pepipoo for parking and driving offences. It is run by bullies and sheeple who seem threatened if anyone posts up success stories that had nothing to do with their advice, or even runs counter to it, as it did in one of my examples. They promote a tickbox approach to legal issues, which is a crap way to deal with anything legal.

Makes depressing reading doesn't it. :|I don't know what AXA, my insurers, do, I must find out. In any event, who is going to report very minor knocks and scratches - supermarket parking prangs, bikes knocking a wing mirror etc. where the insurance wouldn't even cover the excess to cover the entire repair. No one in their right mind, that's who. BTW: mine is a report only incident, not a 'no fault claim'. So that might make a difference. Obviously, if I had used the insurers it would be a NFC.

Oddly enough I did try to ask before all this started but could not find any forums to post on about this topic. I tried Pepipoo and looked for others to do with insurance claims but with no luck. Now I have found this one, I will keep it on my website speed dial. You have all been very helpful, with constructive, relevant answers. I am very grateful.

Thanks for your responses. As it is, I have been using another car for the past couple of months working for a client who lent me one. Any delay in the work being carried out is not due to 'going direct' instead of going through insurance, therefore. I think I have learned my lesson and , no, I don't believe for one minute that I am a greater risk than I was before the accident. I fail to see how I can be under the circumstances to All I wanted was to be treated with a bit of consideration and respect in exchange for leaving their insurance company - Aviva - out of the loop. Instead, I got treated like a mug. I won't be doing that again. Hopefully, I won't have another accident of this magnitude or of any kind. But living in London is like playing Russian Roulette with your life and/or your vehicle. This probably explains why I spent so many years without a car. Unfortunately, that is no longer an option for me when driving is an essential component of the work I do now. I drive about 30K miles a year and have about two near misses each day with the kind of morons on the road these days. Mostly from BMW drivers.

I would have gone through my insurers had it not been for two things: (1) I thought my premium was more likely to go up, as a result of their involvement, and (2) they told me that they would need to use a garage called Coachworks, who I have never heard of. My Finance Agreement terms state explicitely that for any major repairs, in the event of an accident, I should preferably go through the same garage affiliated to the Dealership I bought the car from so that I get genuine Peugeot parts and the result doesn't impact my warranty. I had to take that seriously. Both parties - the garage and the claims management company - have tried to screw me, as far as I am concerned. I am very tempted to go to another garage to do the work now. The only problem with doing that is that the solicitors, paymasters to the lorry driver's own company who hired these claims management people to assess the impact damage and costs, may still want to know who the new garage is and then they will simply tell the same claims management company and they will also go through some behind the scenes negotiations. It would only work if I could keep the garage name private until the bill is presented. I am not sure the solicitor's would agree and the garage almost certainly would want to know who is going to be paying them too and may try to initiate contact with them. In any event, I get the distinct impression that the garage don't really want to do the work anyway and moving it to another garage would only pro-long the start date and give them what they want. In any event, I am screwed either way unless I pass the whole lot over to the insurers to handle who will insist on me using a garage that I have never heard of and I may have even less control over what the end result would be. I don't have much option than to go through the garage I have received the quote from, unless I go through another subsidiary branch. That might be acceptable. There is a Masters elsewhere near to where I live. I might go there instead, but it won't alter the position I am in if they decide to talk to this claims management guy again. I guess I have to exercise logic over emotion and just grit my teeth and get the work done. At least I have managed to secure the degree of work that was originally assessed and not less than that. There is no guarantee that the insurers would agree with the same schedule of works - which just adds to the risk. The real blame, I feel, resides with insurers who don't give any firm assurances that premiums won't raise even in the event of a no blame accident, beyond and above normal raises with inflation and other non-accident related matters. Getting them involved take up their time and resources to deal with an accident claim, even a no fault one, and that can only mean one thing: moi ends up paying a hike just for that alone. Also I feel that keeping them out of it would mean that any premium hike where they were not involved at all in dealing with this accident, except to lodge the report, would more likely be seen as an added associated cost that is recoverable from the solicitor and purely attributable to the incident alone, and not administration. There would be no muddying the water saying that the hike was due to administrative input for handling the claim through the other insurers to negate that part of the claim. I feel I would have more success in getting a hike difference back if they tried that stunt on. It seems that some do try, judging by the contributor above, whose wife suffered the same thing. Something I most certainly would not be happy with. Thanks for all of your advice and help. I guess I was living in cloud cuckoo land expecting to just hire my garage to get an estimate, for me to tell the claims handler what the price would be and they just saying 'go ahead and book' and get them to send us the bill. I personaly feel very affronted that a claims handler was involved in the first place when this was a non-insurance involvement claim. It is as if the lorry driver's company are saying: oh, sorry, we bashed your car, causing £5k worth of damage but if you want us to fix it and pay for it to compensate you, it must be on our terms using our claims handler negotiating what work is required. You will have no say in the matter and, oh, by the way, we are not involving our insurers because we don't want our commercial premiums hiked. For any other service provision you would tell anyone who presented such a message to go and get stuffed.

Just a further update. I got in touch with the claims handler manager again today and he told me he had forwarded the works reference number to the garage to authorise the work to be done. I then rang the garage to confirm and they tried to make out they knew nothing about it. I then went back to the claims handler manager again and he said I should contact his own client the solicitors who are handling the financial claim side in future. I did and they confirmed that they would be paying for the work and that the accident claim management company are not the payer. The whole thing is so complicated it is driving me nuts. I then went to the garage and found out that they, not the claims handler manager, had re-negotiated the work at a lower price from what they originally stated on the quote they gave me in October. So both parties have been talking behind my back to each other. I asked them what justified the lower quote and they told me that some items on the Works had been removed and that the original quote they had offered had included work I had asked for that had nothing to do with the accident. They then gave me another quote, based on this 'behind the scenes' negotation and when I checked off the list of what needs doing they were identical. The only discrepancy was that there was a slight adjustment in the parts costs (they've gone up since October) and a lower per hour quote for doing exactly the same work as per the original quote they gave me. What this amounts to is this: both parties have tried to implicate me in asking for work that had nothing to do with the accident in order to (a) from the claims handler perspective - to lower the cost by accusing me of asking for a full respray and other work to the undamaged side of the car, which was not even listed on the quote and (b) from the garage perspective - to cover up the fact that they overcharged originally on essential work to cover off work they claim I asked them to do (which had nothing to do with the accident) which was not officially listed. Now I know why the claims manager accused me of asking for a full re-spray on the job when that was not listed, it was the garage I chose, who deal with my car, who was trying to shaft me by over-charging the claims management company and trying to bed in other work by hiking up the hourly rate. Isn't that fraud? I feel like telling both parties to stuff it now. My plan is now to go back to the claims management company's own solicitor client who works for the lorry driver's company (who will be paying the bill) and tell them directly that I now plan to get ANOTHER garage on board who can quote me the same as the new estimate on the revised quote and pay the new garage instead for doing the same work as listed on the new quote at that rate and making it clear to them that I do not intend to tell them who I will be using until the bill has been presented to them. I am sick of being implicated in a near fraudulent [problem] which is not of my doing and I am sick of that stupid claims management company manager cooking up negotiations behind my back to lower the bill without even getting my say so first, or keeping me informed as a matter of courtesy by explaining why first. I feel as though i have no say at all in what happens to my car and that I have to put up whatever these two parties decide between them because the money is not coming directly out of my pocket to pay the garage. I may as well have been a car passenger is someone else's car. Like hell. I am the client, I will decide who I will use and on what terms. If the insurance company was involved, I wouldn't mind so much, becuase they are in the business of risk assessment and keeping premiums on an even keel. But they are not. I am doing the lorry driver's company a favour by going direct to the company to settle this to avoid them paying a hike on their corporate premium. They should be kissing my friggin' feet not buggering me around like this and trying to take the **** by making out I am trying to cook up some phoney deal to get a better pre-accident car than I had before the accident and with both parties trying to make out I am to blame for the garage trying to cook their own books by over-charging in the first place. I am really angry about all of this. :-x:-x:-x:-x

Well, if there is a direct correlation between the accident and a hike in my premium I will simply go after the company for the difference. Therefore, I will ensure that any claim against the company is NOT in full and final settlement, to account for any further claims against them for my hikes in premium. I use the simplified accounting method for my own freelance business therefore, I can't claim the difference against tax when all my car business costs are a one-off flat payment. If your wife had her premium hiked was it due to any risk she actually posed that could have been avoided, specifically relating to her, as opposed to any other driver? if so, I can probably understand why this might have resulted in a hike. The insurers tend to think that if you have had one accident you present a greater risk of having another. So you need to ask your wife's insurer what justification there was behind the decision to raise her premium if they felt there was something she could have done to avoid the accident altogether, bar being out on the road in the first place. But in my case, nothing different happened. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and anyone, no matter how good their driving, how careful, would have been hit by this driver because my situation was not avoidable and any risk I posed for being in London on the road that time on that day would have been accounted for in the premium I was already paying, therefore the risk caused by the crash was already calculated into the premium I was already paying too and there is no way they can calculate that I would be a greater risk in future over this incident. How could I be? It would be impossible to calculate. If you are right and they do raise it, regardless, and there is no redress on the premium hike settlement to add to cost of repairs, I would certainly consider suing through a solicitor for a future-based cash settlement award too, in order to cover such hikes over a set period of time likely to take me to retirement age. After all, if the accident was their fault so are any hikes in my premium if I can show that I did not pose an additional risk over and above the premium I was already paying (it was avoidable, therefore, albeit in not my fault). I didn't notify my insurance company to raise my premium, I notified them because the terms stated I should and I wanted to make use of the premium I was already paying to cover such risks that amounted to the reported accident in question, should it be necessary.

I don't agree that I am at greater risk. I was nearly stationary in the car when the lorry simply moved too much to the left and squashed my car. I was trapped and unable to do anything. There was nothing I could do to avoid the accident happening. So I cannot be a greater risk. Even a formula 1 driver would have had the same accident, given time and place. I don't think my premium should be affected and if it is I will certainly be challenging it. The other side accepted full liability and don't premiums only increase when it is 'knock for knock' or my fault? Not their fault entirely? No, the police were not notified. No one was hurt and there is no requirement to get the police involved. The lorry driver was very apologetic, explained what had happened and I did not suspect he was under the influence of drugs or drink. He was lucid but careless not negligent or dangerous. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when the lorry veered to avoid another car turning right. I am inclined to go through the insurance route now. I have a very uneasy feeling that the claims management company will not simply pay me the quote money into my account and let me pay the garage whilst working to my directions, according to their quote for £30. They will want to deal with the garage direct - as their payers - and I have an uneasy feeling that they will cook up some sort of deal behind my back where I don't get the car back the way the quote is listed and they will try a cheaper alternative to get paid anything at all or they will simply contrive some sort of excuse not to do the work at all because the claims management company have tried to put them off doing the work (they have already tried to pull that stunt once already). I don't like the claims management guy anyway. He has lied to me and accused me of something that was completely baseless - saying I had cooked up a deal with the garage for a full unnecessary re-spray, which was absolute rot and was not even listed on the official quote. That alone puts me right off doing this myself. However, I do intend to try and go through their insurance directly first and only if they refuse to deal with me direct will I go through my own. Ultimately, I need to know who I need to sue if something goes wrong further on down the line and one of the party's (there are about three parties involved) believe the claims management company are working on behalf of the insurance company for my crash whilst the claims management company say they are not involving them at all and are working directly to the company. Again, another discrepancy and mixed messages that just adds complications and confusion and makes me feel distinctly uneasy. Insurance it is then. Even if it does take a little longer. The car is still in working order and I can still drive it. So I have very little to lose and everything to gain, so it seems. Thanks for your advice, I appreciate it to everyone who answered. Happy New Year

I am inclined to agree now, but I do think if I get my own insurance company involved they will simply hike up my premium for causing them the work. I don't want that. Do you think contacting their insurance instead would be a better move?

Hi everyone, I'm new here I was involved in a lorry crash in early October and the lorry driver admitted full liability, so this is not in dispute. The original arrangement to sort out the mess to my car (he squashed the side of it) was to deal with it all privately through his own company. I was given details of who I should contact to arrange this. I thought this was a good idea becuase I thought if I went through my own insurance to sort it out with their insurance company, I would probably end up with a premium hike. I was keen to avoid that, so I just reported the accident instead and decided to do it all privately. I was contacted shortly after the accident by a claims management company who asked to do their own assessment on my car to ascertain the extent of damage. I had already done one of my own, got a quote for the damage. The quote itself cost £30. I told the claims management company that I needed my own garage to do the work because I was on a PCP Agreement and the terms stipulated that my own garage should do any repairs, preferably, to ensure original parts were used for replacements. I had to agree to the claims management company to do their own too. I was quite cross to see the Agent looking over my car in the forecourt of my house without having first knocked on my door. I noticed him out of the window. After he came and went, I had first told him about the Quote I already had paid for from my own garage - making it clear to him that those repairs would need to be done, not any revised work they might consider necessary instead. He said he would contact my garage for a copy of that. A few weeks later I got a call from another guy from the same claims management company who virtually accused me of having diddled the quote, asking for more work than was necessary - a complete re-spray - which was not necessary. I told him in no uncertain terms that the garage I got the quote from was bona fide and had a duty of care not to over-stipulate the work required by law when I checked it later, after the call, a re-spray wasn't even listed on it. I rang him again and told him that what was on that quote was the work I needed doing and they THEY would be paying for it. That was all there was to it, as far as I was concerned. He then told me that when he had contacted my garage for the quote, my garage had since refused to do this work for me - even though they had not told me personally about that decision. I rang them myself and they told me that they had said nothing of the kind but they did need a work repairs number to authorise payment from this claims management company or they could not begin work without it. I rang back the claim management guy what the outcome was at the claims management company and he agreed to go ahead with it all. I then put all this in writing this time, asking him specifically to reassure me that they would provide a works repair number to my garage to do the repairs, as per the quote they had originally given me. I also said in my email that the work may not be in full and final settlement if they discovered more needed to be done down the line and to confirm that they understood this. I did not get this, just a go ahead to book the garage. Since then I have done nothing at all to get the car repaired. I have been borrowing cars in my job lent to me by other clients, so my car has not been used much. However, I have been thinking about all of this and feel distinctly uneasy about going through this claims management company who are billing the company direct and leaving their own insurance company out of it. I feel now, given the messing about, the implied accusations, that the claims management company and my garage could easily cook up a deal behind my back to do less than was on the quote - so that the company pays less, but I don't get a comparable car back to what it was like before the crash. I now feel I want to chuck in all these behind the scenes arrangements, get in touch with their own insurance company and get them to instigate the repairs. I still don't intend to get my own insurance company involved though. Do you think I am being paranoid or do you think I am being set up for a fall? The works quote my garage compiled for the £30 charge is around £4300 worth of damage with a list of work to be carried out (and says nothing about a re-spray). My car is quite new and was not written off by the claim's management guy that looked over the car, even though it was officially worth £6800 at the time of the accident. The claims management company who are dealing with this on behalf of the lorry driver's company has issued a 'retail' works reference (not an insurance one). NB: Another thing I do not like about this private arrangement is that there are too many parties involved - the lorry driver's company, a company they speak to about repairs, the repair's department claim's management company (who also apparently work for the insurance company who they are not involving). It all seems too complicated to me. The last thing I want is to be taken for a ride and shafted in some way. Any advice from those who might be able to offer sound, constructive advice about this please?