MID is there for all our sakes

Approximately 1.8 million vehicles are being driven around the UK without the appropriate motor insurance, in fact probably without any insurance at all.

Fortunately the police are taking them off the roads in their thousands every month, helped by data from the Motor Insurance Database (MID), run by the Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB). This is great news for the honest policyholders, whether businesses or private individuals.

But huge numbers of company drivers are putting themselves at risk of joining the criminals, and in seeing their vehicles towed to a compound until they can prove insurance. These vehicles are those that are missing from the MID and can therefore appear to the police to be uninsured.

Now the MIB has put this problem squarely back in the hands of the drivers by setting up a website where they can check that their vehicles are on the MID, and safe from seizure.

Uninsured driving costs the UK economy £500 million a year, and whilst fines can be up to £5,000, and six points is the automatic penalty, many criminals continue to take the risk.

Weapon

For the past two years the police have had a new weapon to bring the message home to these drivers – insure your car or lose it! In 2007 over 150,000 vehicles were seized for non-insurance and 40% of those were crushed or sold. For the remainder the price of getting their vehicles back was a recovery fee of £105 plus a daily storage charge of £12 (both potentially due to increase significantly), as well as the new insurance policy they should already have had!

The less welcome news for drivers of vehicles insured on commercial (often fleet) policies is that despite being fully insured, their organisations – whether they be local government, haulage firms, automotive retailers or a string of other businesses – are putting them at risk of sharing the fate of the uninsured driver, because they have not provided the full vehicles details to the MID.

Such vehicles must be notified by the organisations themselves, as instructed by insurers, or the policyholders themselves are breaking the law. Now the MIB has set up a website, www.askmid.com, which allows drivers to check that the vehicle they are driving is on the MID.

It couldn’t be easier – just enter the registration number, confirm you are the legitimate user of that vehicle, and you will see the details of the vehicle held on the MID for that registration. If nothing is found, or the details are wrong, it’s time to check with your fleet manager why the vehicle is not correctly notified, before the police – who see the same information – ask the same question.

The website is designed to give peace of mind to drivers, and ultimately help the police identify the real criminals:

Most drivers want to stay on the right side of the law, and they certainly don’t want to waste their time trying to explain to the police that they really are insured.

Having a vehicle seized costs a business – in missed deliveries, lost working time, angry customers, to say nothing of the recovery charges – and meanwhile the police have probably let a real uninsured driver go by unchallenged.

It’s a lose-lose situation.

We realise that businesses may think that buying their insurance cover is already quite enough of a cost, and that keeping the insurer up-to-date on vehicle changes may not be top of their to-do list, even though it’s a legal requirement. ASKMID gives them a quick and easy way of checking whether an oversight could lead to more serious consequences – including potentially a £5,000 fine for not supplying their data.

ASKMID will also help companies keep track of which vehicles should have been removed from their policies. Leaving vehicles on MID after they have been sold or returned to a rental or leasing company may not seem like a big problem, but companies may unwittingly be helping the next owner to appear insured when they have no intention of obeying the law.

Previous

While they drive round on the previous owner’s company policy, the company may also face some tricky questions from the insurer who finds that rather more vehicles seem to be insured on the policy than expected. Taking vehicles off cover promptly helps the police spot the uninsured drivers more quickly.

The police are not just on the look-out for total evaders; they know that a lot of drivers are cutting costs by using their vehicles outside the terms of their insurance. The MID can tell them whether business use is covered, along with carriage of goods or passengers and a host of other uses.

It’s a short-sighted policy for businesses to mislead their insurers, because if these drivers have a crash they could be responsible for claims running into millions of pounds. Just recently an uninsured driver was bankrupted to pay back a claim made to the MIB – the same could apply to any business not insuring properly.

The police have the right to seize any vehicle if they believe they have reasonable grounds to do so – and even if there really is insurance in place they are entitled to levy the recovery charge. Responsible businesses should make sure that they and their employees do not find themselves on the wrong end of that decision.

Special stickers which stress the importance of checking that your vehicle is listed at www.askmid.com are available by emailing Lorraine Preston at lpreston@mib.org.uk

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