Protected NCB

[dcw@pr]

Recently I had my car broken into, and my satnav stolen. In the process half the dashboard was ripped out too - what a bunch of monkeys. The amount of damage caused (about £1500) really neccesitated making a claim, with the result that I lost my 3 years NCB. How does a protected NCB work, and how do I go about protecting mine in the future?

On a side note - how do insurance companies get away with charging so much more money when the NCB is lost, even if the claim is in no way your fault, such as being broken into? This REALLY annoys me!

[Big Al.]

When you take out your policy you just ask them to include NCB protection.
A few quid more per year knowing that if you have to claim, your no claims is still intact.

[GreigM]

Are you sure you lost all 3 years NCB...usually you will only loose a year or 2 for each claim.

Protected NCB only kicks in when you have 4 years or more, so wouldn't have applied to you anyway. Generally you have to pay a fairly large extra wedge on your premium. Given you don't loose ALL of your NCB is the price of the protection worth it....you still have to declare any incidents after all, even if you were protected..so your premium will be loaded accordingly and will probably outweigh any perceived NCB. I have a relative in the insurance industry and they recommend NOT taking protected NCB as it is not financially worth it.

[nonegreen]

It costs me about £100 a year and as I have had 2 cars written off through no fault of mine but only 1 of them was paid by the 3rd party i reckon its saved me about £6-9K. I will be sticking with my protected NCB thanks. Best thing I ever did.