Car Insurance - What is Meant by Third Party, Comprehensive?

UK Car Insurance - What is Fire, Theft, Comprehensive Anyway?

The basic options available to people who need to insure their car (a legal requirements in the UK) are threefold.

1 - Third Party Only
2 - Third Party Fire And Theft
3 - Comprehensive

All three are allowed within the law - the first covers your insurance costs for anyone who you are in collision with (but not yourself). Your own car is not covered for any costs, and neither is it covered in case of fire, or if it gets stolen.

To get around this, you can improve your cover level to Third Party, Fire and Theft which ensures that so long as you drive carefully, and don't cause any accidents then you should be basically OK. However, the fact that you may get hit by someone else when it is difficult to ascertain whose fault it was, may mean that you need to consider Comprehensive Insurance.

Generally speaking the lower the value of the car, the less you need to insure it. Cars worth less than 1000 pounds are probably not worth insuring for a few hundred a year at comprehensive levels.

It goes without saying that the "Third Party Only" is the minimum and cheapest insurance around. When you include fire and theft the costs increase a little but not too much. The Comprehensive level of cover is the one which really gets the price rising because there is usually plenty of good things included.

Some of the key variables to watch are whether you have windscreen cover (a stone that flies through the air at an effective 140mph can be pretty damaging) and whether this includes mending chips to the screen for free, with an excess (a fixed price you pay if you claim) and whether the claim counts against you in future years.

Which brings me to explain the great "No Claims Discount" consideration. For each year that you don't claim, you are typically entitled to an increasing "No Claims Discount". The amount that it is worth varies from company to company, but typically you might see a 20% discount for 1 year's "no claims", a 40% for 2 years, 50% for 3 years and 60% or more for 4 or 5 years no claims.

The insurance companies can and do share your information, so it's not possible to simply claim you haven't had an accident for 5 years.

You will be asked to prove it!