kll wrote:
"In the past an insurance company sent a recorded delivery letter if insurance payment had lapsed and Road traffic act cover was being ceased. Is this still the case?"
Well. A couple of years ago, I had dealings with an insurance company who I probably am not supposed to mention. Filled in a webquote, then ended up phoning them and bought the insurance over the phone (because they wanted collisions in the last 5 years and the website had only sent them the last 3).
They'd happened to misspell my name on the paperwork and insurance certificate, so I called them up and spoke to a call centre who had a computer error they couldn't understand. And said they'd sort things out and send out new paperwork.
A week later, still nothing. So I call again and this time get a UK call centre, who get an error they can't understand so go and get someone. The someone tells me the policy was cancelled a week ago.
Their computer had a spasm, and decided I'd had more than three claims in five years, and therefore wasn't insurable and apparently, this isn't something that can be fixed easily.
They also refuse to refund me the premium - on the basis that they can't do refunds until the cover starts, and they can't start the cover because the computer says it's invalid... and I'll have to talk to an office which, it turns out, never answers the phone.
And I ask when exactly they planned to tell me that cover had been cancelled and they said that that letter can only be sent out after cover has started and cover was never going to be started... so if they hadn't misspelled the paperwork, I'd have been driving around uninsured. And on the police database as uninsured.
Eventually I lost my temper and went on a rampage through the company. The best part was where the call centre manager refused to tell me the phone number of corporate legal on the grounds that it was "secret", so I was further angered by having to go and find it.
I then had a wide ranging conversation with their legal department.
We touched on a number of topics, including whether they thought that taking money off my credit card for services they are not willing to render should be reported as a theft or a fraud, if their letter to me accusing me of lying on the application constituted slander, whether their further publishing that information would be libel and whether their failure to talk to me about the revocation constituted negligence.
Very very very soon after that, they refunded me the premium, paid me compensation for the trouble involved, and wrote me an apology letter saying they had revoked cover mistakenly, and a promise that since they'd done it in error they no longer consider the cover revoked by them but instead cancelled by me. And hence not declarable on future application.
So, in answer to your question, no, they don't send out letters. Not if the company involved is Less Than competent.
Oh, dear! But if you had not known which legal threat buttons to press you would have probably not even got a refund!
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