From next month Esure will also offer buildings and contents insurance
Posted in General on 28. Aug, 2010
From next month, Esure will also offer buildings and contents insurance. However, its target market is the low risk, so there’s little point asking for a quote if you’re a young male driver with a fast car, or have a ‘risky’ inner-city postcode.”We will try to quote as many people as we can, [although] the key to our business will be that it’s time safe drivers were rewarded,” says Mr Wood.Esure says its premiums will be up to 30 per cent cheaper than its rivals’, though much will depend on whether you fit into its criteria, say, for “safe” drivers. As with any insurance, don’t rely on one quote; shop around and make a few comparisons.Most companies have a maximum no-claims discount of 65 per cent, but esure offers 70 per cent for those who have not made a claim in five years, increasing by 1 per cent a year up to a maximum 75 per cent. Esure also claims to have the most sophisticated pricing structure in the market, using exhaustive permutations that let it pinpoint the risk profile of potential customers.The other new entrant to the market, Bluesure, hopes to persuade us to have all our home, motor, travel and health insurance with one provider in one comprehensive product. It claims this will not only simplify matters but save consumers, on average, £200 a year. You have to buy at least two core types of insurance to get a discount – a similar offer is available from many other insurers – and Bluesure has no annual renewals; customers pay monthly and can cancel their cover at any time with one month’s notice.”We see the continuous policy as a natural evolution of Direct Line’s concept – we’ve just taken it up to the next level,” says Tony Martin, chief executive of Bluesure. “It saves time and I think it’s inevitable that others will try to emulate the idea.”Other firms in the industry seem relaxed about these new arrivals: “We welcome competition as it encourages people to shop around,” says Charles Crawford, technical services director at Churchill.But the danger of Bluesure is that customers will stop shopping around.
One of the big incentives to find the best deal is the renewal letter you receive once a year. If consumers have continuous policies, which they pay for monthly by direct debit, they may not notice premium hikes.It also seems unlikely that esure and Bluesure’s products will really lead to another price war. “It’s a different sort of market they’re coming into,” says Suzanne Moore, spokeswoman for the Association of British Insurers.Premiums in general have been rising over the past few years, and part of the reason is that companies have been unable to sustain the price cuts introduced to compete with the direct players. But the main reason is that personal injury claims have increased as we become a more litigious society.
Ms Moore says some of the problem areas can be tackled – by making your car or home more secure, for example – but others, such as personal injury, can’t.Despite the premium rises, there is a lot of competition in the insurance market. And while esure and Bluesure may have overstated their cases, their arrival should be good news for consumers.Contacts: Bluesure, 0800 587 7000; Churchill, 0800 200300 (motor), 0800 200345 (home); Direct Line, 0845 246 8888 (motor), 0845 246 8000 (home); esure, 0845 603 6303. The Government will announce today that cash raised from speeding fines can be used to buy more roadside cameras. The Government will announce today that cash raised from speeding fines can be used to buy more roadside cameras.
John Spellar, the minister for Transport, will say that a one-year pilot scheme that allowed police forces to use the proceeds of fines to buy more cameras to install on dangerous stretches of road is to be extended nationally. But, under the new scheme, the cameras must be “clearly visible” to drivers, the minister will say, because “the aim is to stop accidents not to catch motorists”.The policy is expected to be ridiculed by road traffic campaigners, who say visible cameras will fail to catch the most dangerous drivers. The Government, however, will argue that evidence shows drivers slow down as they approach obvious speed cameras.A government report published today shows that, in the eight areas included in the pilot scheme, the number of people killed or injured in speed-related accidents fell by 47 per cent and the number of drivers speeding near cameras fell from 55 per cent to 16 per cent.Mr Spellar will say: “Police forces round the country are now able to form a partnership with local traffic authorities and magistrates’ courts and apply to join the scheme under the conditions I have outlined.”I believe that many will want to do so …
However, we are clear that the aim is to stop accidents not catch motorists and to ensure that safety cameras must be clearly visible.”The Department of Transport will recommend that local authorities locate cameras at sites which have the worst records for accidents.An analysis of camera sites shows that drivers reduce their speed by an average of 4.2 mph per when approaching a camera, and the Government believes additional cameras will stop many drivers breaking the speed limit.The study of 250 speed camera sites showed there were 379 fewer collisions near them and 109 fewer people were killed or injured as a result. It estimated that £27m was saved during the one-year pilots in Cleveland, Essex, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire, South Wales, Strathclyde and Thames Valley.Four more police forces – Derbyshire, Lancashire, North Wales and Staffordshire – will join the scheme today with others applying later this year.The AA said support among drivers for speed cameras was waning. In a survey of more than 500 motorists, 41 per cent found cameras “very acceptable” in 2001 – down from 53 per cent in 1999.Andrew Howard, the motoring organisation’s head of road safety, said: “Public support for cameras is crucial. The public become uneasy when police are allowed access to fine revenues and, with more police forces set to use fine revenue to cover the cost of using cameras, they must be as open as possible about funding, signing and siting of cameras.”. Airline pilots are increasingly unable to deal with emergencies, putting passengers’ lives at risk, the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAS) has been warned. Airline pilots are increasingly unable to deal with emergencies, putting passengers’ lives at risk, the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAS) has been warned.
New entrants to the profession receive too much of their training in flight simulators to save money and when they start flying they find that computers perform virtually all the duties of flight crew, one of Britain’s leading air safety experts told an RAS conference. David Learmount, safety specialist for the journal Flight International, cited a series of air accidents in which there had been no technical faults and where weather conditions were not to blame.Mr Learmount told an RAS conference on air crew training that, because modern airliners could be flown “hands-off” from start to finish, pilots might not have the ability to deal with unexpected events, particularly when landing.”An airline pilot can go into a modern simulator and go through all the routines necessary for emergency practice but, when it comes to the real thing, have such pilots got the hands-on skills to cope? I think that the evidence shows that they have not,” he said.Mr Learmount said there had been seven recent crashes where pilots’ inability to fly aircraft in emergencies might have contributed to the tragedy.
These included the Gulf Air disaster in Bahrain last year, in which 143 passengers and crew were killed.He added that simulators were very useful to rehearse extreme events, which would be too dangerous to simulate on real flights. One of the other prime motives behind their use was to keep down the cost of training.He said pilots were “increasingly unable to cope when the autopilot is tripped out” adding: “I just think that we have to realise that many pilots flying for the airlines just do not get enough real flying.” There was “no substitute for hands-on flying”, he told the conference.In a modern airliner, pilots preparing for a flight from Heathrow to Los Angeles in a jumbo jet would need only to taxi their plane into position, type in a code, press the “go” button and then sit back until they taxied the plane off the runway in California. Flight crew would not have to intervene unless the service was diverted. Mr Learmount said that long-haul pilots, in particular, made “very few” landings in relation to the number of hours they spent in the air.Airlines are believed to encourage flight crew to use autopilots in mid-flight partly because the machines operate the aircraft more economically than would a pilot. The systems are so sensitive that they can compensate for slight changes in the centre of gravity when passengers leave their seats to go to the lavatory, according to The Tombstone Imperative, a recent book on air safety by Andrew Weir.A spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority, which sets training standards, said there was no difference between using modern simulators and actually flying aircraft.He said that where pilots were switching from an A310 airliner to an A320, which were very similar, time spent on the simulator would often be counted as flying time.”You could never practise extreme situations because it would be too dangerous, so using the simulator is a huge advantage. The positives outweigh the very few negatives.”Pilots usually landed and took off in real aircraft to become used to handling the manoeuvres, he said.. The Home Secretary has ordered an immediate review of the policy of resettling asylum-seekers in Britain after tensions in Glasgow led to the killing of a Kurdish refugee.