comparison quote

[centurion]

A friend of mine bought her car insurance through a comparison site(quidco compare) and clicked through to pay the premium that they offered it to her at. All her information was correct. a day later she got an email saying that she needed to contact them so she phoned them up. They then told her that they needed another £180 which she was not going to pay so she asked for a refund of the money she had paid. They told her that they were with holding an admin fee of £45.
Are they allowed to charge an admin fee? I always thought they had to give 14 day to cancel
The company was called chartwell insurance which use adrian flux

[Jonny Wilkinson]

I suspect there is some information missing from the above narrative. Probably something that your friend is not telling you.

If the underwriter (we don't know from the above who the underwriter is) offered the premium at £x and then wanted £x+180, it will be because of some extra information that she supplied them with after the quote was given e.g. she'd had undisclosed accidents, the car was modified, was previously written off, she has points or a restricted licence or decided to remove a named driver or wanted to use it for business use or something.

The £45 admin fee will probably be the fee charged by Adrian Flux/Chartwell Insurance (they are the same company BTW) who are the broker. They are allowed to put an admin charge on as technically they did the work to set up the policy with the underwriter and that policy is now being cancelled.

Also, if she went on cover, the underwriter will charge a pro-rata day cost for the number of days she was on cover before she cancelled.

IF nothing was disclosed after the offer was made and they came back with a change of premium WITHOUT gaining any info from any databases that would affect the risk, I would consider pursuing it by asking for an explanation as to why the premium changed and if it was their mistake, ask for the admin charge back. If they refuse, I'd refer it to the ombudsman.

There is a clearly laid out path to follow if she is unhappy. She just needs to follow it if she is sure she is in the right.

[kingk]

I had the same sort of thing when cancelling a policy after a few days, they charged me for days the policy was in place which worked out around £35 per day even though my policy was only £670 for a year


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[centurion]

The policy had not started. All her details were correct on the comparison site but arfer she had paid the premium they wanted more info which she told them. one of the querstions was what was her employment status which she selected retired as she had early retired on health grounds. The problem had only flagged up after the purchase