A YEAR ago the car insurance renewal letter dropped on the mat with an extra big thud.

A well-known British and now international company I had been with for years had increased the premium by about 30 per cent with no explanation whatsoever.

There’d been no accidents or claims for about ten years, I hadn’t changed cars or moved house.

True another zero birthday had been reached – but surely getting older and wiser should decrease the risk rather than put it up?

I was so incensed that I phoned the insurer’s call centre. The policy was direct with the company rather than through a broker because it was supposedly a better deal that way!

Still there was no hint of any apology – or explanation. When I said I was going to look elsewhere for the future the member of staff went away to ‘make inquiries’ and came back with a ‘revised renewal quote’ which was £30 cheaper.

I then spent about an hour on the internet and switched to another company. It’s a firm which has won a number of consumer satisfaction awards and only deals directly with customers by phone or internet.

Their quote was significantly cheaper and the policy actually lays out in plain English what’s covered and allows my wife to start accumulating her own no claims discount as the second named driver for the first time.

And my point is?

Well, last week a Darwen councillor was complaining that household insurance premiums had gone up in the BB3 postcode area despite a drop in crime statistics.

Brokers said the rises were because of the cost faced by the industry in having to deal with increasing numbers of ‘fraudulent and exaggerated claims.’ Personal experience leads me to believe that the insurance industry has ceased relying on calculations of pure actuarial risk when working out how much to charge for premiums.

The only measure now seems to be ‘let’s see how much extra we can screw out of people.’ ‘If customers protest there’s a built-in margin that the renewal can be reduced by which still leaves us with a healthy profit.’ When so-called professionals operate in such a cynical manner it’s hardly surprising that a small percentage of folk will try to submit dodgy claims just to get back some of the money they’ve laid out.

Many insurance executives are in grave danger of joining bankers at the top of the list of professionals in whom the public has lost trust because of their corporate financial greed.