It’s that time of year again and my car insurance is up for renewal. The cost has risen yet again and the services being offered have, predictably enough, gotten slightly worse. This happens every year with the same certainty as the sun rising 🙁

For the last month I’ve been innundated with offers from rival insurance companies to change my policy. They all offer “the cheapest quotes” but very few actually have anything positive to offer. My policy of rejecting any company that engages in negative advertising means I have yet to request a single quote following the barrage of junk mail. What irks me slightly is how do they know? My business with my current insurer should be just that – a direct relationship. How then do the other companies appear to know the exact date and time that my insurance expires? This is slightly troubling and does illustrate just how little control we truly have over the information about us in circulation.

The reason for buying insurance should be to protect my car. In reality this year the reason is because I have to. It’s the law. I have lost total faith in insurance companies to do anything other than protect their own vested interests and industry. Virtually everyone I’ve spoken to about insurance who ahs had any form of claim has told how it’s been assigned to the “knock for knock” bracket of resolution – meaning that no-one was to blame and neither company has to pay the other and there will never be any expensive court cases. Both people also end up paying their entire excess. Of course the companies involved do eventually pay for repairs, which when it happens so often causes a rise in the premiums of everyone. Who wins? The insurance companies.

Given the current idiotic stance by the government and police with regard to traffic policy the standard of driving is going down, not up (as long as dangerous driving is done at a speed below the speed limit it’s seemingly not a problem or a cause for conern and unlikely to attract any attention) so the problme is only getting worse. There was a campaign a little while ago to try and get more people to have insurance. The nunbers of people driving without cover has apparently gone up in recent years – a trend which I have a lot of sympathy with. Perhaps if the insurance companies weren’t so intent on making money at the expense of providing a real service the situation wouldn’t be so bad.

Time to get the credit card out again I guess…