What Steps Can You Take If Your Insurance Claim Is Rejected?
Car insurance is an absolutely necessary element of owning a motor vehicle in the UK. There are numerous types of policy available, ranging from 1 day insurance to full annual cover (the most common in the UK). You will need to be covered whether you’re driving your own car on your own policy, or driving someone else’s car using temporary car insurance.
When you fill out your application for your policy, insurers will expect you to disclose anything that may be important, even if they haven’t directly asked you for it. This is known as ‘utmost good faith’ and is often used by insurers to deny claims. If you do claim on your policy, you should check your application and ensure there’s nothing you haven’t told them that may affect their decision on your claim. If there is something you haven’t mentioned, insurers may treat this at deceit and use it as a basis to reject your claim.
Insurance providers will often use small print in contracts to place clauses; usually giving them sufficient room to get out of have to pay on a claim in certain circumstances. If you do ever need to claim on your policy, you should bear the following in mind:
Any small print in your policy is usually small for a reason and is often very important. You should always read these parts thoroughly before signing on any policy but even after you’ve signed, make sure you study it carefully before, during and after your claim. Ideally you should check out all clauses in a potential policy before you sign; it’s easy to be tempted into signing up quickly by an instant car insurance quote on a insurers website or over the phone; these can often seem very cheap and are often too good to be true.
You should try and keep accurate records of any correspondence with your insurer. If it’s a phone call, take notes, if it’s a letter or email, keep a copy somewhere. You should try and make sure any reciepts you have are always kept in a safe place and are organised well. This could make a big difference when it comes to backing up your insurance claim, particularly in the case of theft.
You should also bear in mind that you’re not legally required to accept whatever offer your insurer makes you. If you’re unhappy with the amount offered by your insurer, you can ask for it to be increased as long as you can present a clear, coherent case as to why this should happen.
If you’ve exhausted all options and your insurer still refuses to pay out on your claim, you can contact the Financa Ombudsman service, which handles thousands of car related complaints every year. They also settle insurance claims that are being disputed.
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