We used a loss assessor to handle a household insurance claim for us. The fees agreed at the start were 10% of the eventual payout + expenses, which I believe to be fairly standard. However, having just sent us a statement, he's not only charged us the 10% & expenses, but 17.5% VAT on top. Is this correct? That effectively makes it a 27.5% fee - not the 10% I was expecting them to take!

I recently made an insurance claim to have my damaged laminate floor replaced. My insurers say I can use one of three companies and I chose Floors 2 Go and their Signature Plus Oak laminate with 25 year guarantee at £19.99 p/sq metre. Initially I did not tell them it was to be paid for by my insurance company but they gave me all the spiel about we are doing a special extended discount and you can have 20% off if you buy today. We agreed a price for the laminate and I also asked a price for fitting which they said would be £490 but they were fairly sure they could get £50 off if they asked the fitter nicely. I said OK and then contacted my insurance assessor, paid my £50 excess and he posted the payment voucher to me made out to Floors 2 Go. I then rang Floors 2 Go and told them I wanted to proceed with the purchase and after explaining it will be paid for through my insurance claim, they are now saying I can have the laminate at the agreed discount rate but the fitting charge will go up to £735 due to the charge my insurers will make. Then after a short re-think they said I would only need to find £100 extra to add to the insurance voucher. All very confusing. I contacted my insurance claim assessor and he said he knew nothing about any extra fitting charges and said my claim had been assessed by an independent laminate floor company and the valuation was good. He suggested I cancel the voucher and contact my insures direct, which I do not want to do this as I would like the laminated fitted before Christmas. I said I was OK with the valuation and agreed the problem was Floors 2 Go moving the goal posts. Any advice on how to proceed without having to pay the extra £100 would be appreciated.

Hi all, I just wanted to ask a question. I have a car with accessories that weren't disclosed when I took out the car insurance. I had an crash with another car, and the other driver was responsible for the accident. I read that my policy won't pay for the accesories that weren't disclosed but I wanted to know that taking into account the other car was responsible, if the insurance company of the other driver should also cover the accesories as they should pay for my damages. Thanks in advance.

My husband pranged his car in January after skidding on ice on a country lane and turning the vehicle over. There was substantial damage to the side of the car and due to the engine being upturned for some time this resulted in it 'blowing'. Undrivable (due to engine failure) we arranged for our friend to tow the car back to our private property. My husband claimed on his insurance - Groupama - who immediately sent an engineer to view the car, deeming it a 'write-off'. He liaised with Groupama over the phone and negotiated a settlement figure and agreed that he could keep the vehicle in order for him to sell the parts for spares. He received a letter from Groupama with his settlement cheque stating that the vehicle was a Category C write off, that his insurance policy was now terminated and that in order to re-insure the vehicle, he must apply for a VIC. He was also asked to surrender the MOT. The car in question has stayed on our land ever since, until this week, we finally found a buyer the spares. Yesterday my husband and a friend, pushed the car (remember it has no engine) from its resting point to another position (still within our land) so that the buyer could easily push it on to a trailer. He then popped to the shops, returning 45 minutes later to find it clamped! It was a DVLA clamp! What a nightmare, the buyer was due to turn up within another hour, and my husband had to go to a funeral, so his secretary called the number on the warrant to be told that the vehicle had been clamped as it had no TAX and had not been declared SORN. She was told that regardless of the vehicle being on our private property, they were allowed to clamp the car. Obviously due to the iminant arrival of the buyer of the scrap he needed to have the clamp removed asap so the secretary paid £260 fine. We were under the impression that as the car had been written off that we did not need to apply for SORN as it states this on the Direct Gov website: http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Motoring/OwningAVehicle/UntaxedVehicle/DG_069727 and as my husband had surrendered the MOT, and the vehicle cannot be insured until it has passed a VIC then it would have been impossible to tax it! Anyway, husband called the DVLA this morning, to be told that there was no record on their system of the car being written off, only that it had been involved in an accident and that it was my husbands resosponsibilty to SORN the car. My question is this - surely it is the responsibilty of the Insurer to notify the DVLA that the vehicle is written off? Don't they have to log this fact with the ' motor insurance anti fraud and theft register' and the 'Motor Insurance Database' ??? What should we do next? Ideally we would like to claim back the £260 from the DVLA Any ideas????