Cornerstone’s low cost fleet insurance top tips to help you pick up the premiums for your budget:
Reducing the premium: The policy excess ranges from £100 upwards. Increasing the excess up to £250 or £500 or higher should lower your overall premium costs. It is worth looking at comparisons with varying excess amounts before choosing the most cost effective option.
Remove the windscreen cover – our clients have found that most normal screens can be replaced locally for less money than the insurers official replacement firms. Please note that if you have more exotic cars and fancy glass its worth checking the replacement screen prices and comparing this to the premium savings for removing the windscreen cover.
Most fleet policies are written on an any driver basis with an age limit. Restricting the driving to exclude young drivers may appeal to more underwriters and attract lower premiums. Inexperienced drivers or drivers with accident or conviction records are less attractive to a fleet underwriter. Taking these drivers off the fleet should improve the fleet costing.
Fitting good security devices such as trackers and immobilisers to high value or high powered cars is becoming more common. The cost of the additional security is falling and in some cases fitted as standard. Enquire with you fleet insurers to make sure your getting the broadest fleet discounts for the security fitted to your fleet.
Agency drivers on one of our clients fleets managed to have three accidents in seven days hitting bridges, cyclists and oncoming traffic. At renewal the premiums reflected the poor claims experience. It may not be possible to run your fleet without agency staff therefore we recommend that time is taken to run through a thorough induction & familiarisation of the vehicles coupled with a short test drive to check their competency. Keeping your fleet good claims experience in tack is a priority.
No fault accidents can impact on your claims experience at renewal even though it was not caused by your driver. Your fleet insurers still pay out for claims handlers, admin, motor engineers etc. Cornerstone provide all of our clients with Cornerstone accident management and when a no fault incident occurs all efforts are made to track down the third party insurers and get them to authorise repairs for our clients vehicles without going through the fleet insurance. Getting the third party insurers to pay for repairs can make a big improvement to your claims records.
Driver handbooks are a great way to make your fleet drivers more aware of their responsibilities towards looking after their vehicle, reporting defects, keeping the vehicle maintenance up to date, declaring motoring convictions etc. Underwriters like to know that fleets are well managed and the Cornerstone Driver Handbooks are an excellent way to demonstrate good management practices.
Insurance broking with a wide selection of fleet underwriters is an essential part of the fleet review. Cornerstone have access to over 20 insurers including Lloyds of London, Axa, AIG, Allianz, Arista, Aviva, Chaucer, Equity Red Star, Fusion, Liverpool Victoria, Minibus Plus, NIG, QBE, MR Radcliffe’s, Royal Sun Alliance, Summit, UK General & Zurich.
For all your low cost fleet insurance needs call Kim Francis at Cornerstone Business Insurance Ltd on 0116 3440040.