VanInsurance

Adding Additional Cover to Your Policy

Many people eventually decide to let others drive their van. Unless you have fully comprehensive cover, you will need to take out additional insurance for this purpose. It will usually make your premiums more expensive, but not in every circumstance.

If you have fully comprehensive insurance on your van, you are probably already covered for additional drivers. However, you will need to check your policy to ensure that this is so. Even if your policy does provide you with coverage for extra drivers, they will not have the same benefits as you. It is likely that they will be restricted to third party only cover. You may consider this to be insufficient for your purposes, and if so, you will need to look for other solutions.

Your Children as Additional Drivers

A natural step for most business van owners is to allow their grown children to drive their van if they are going to partake in the family business. If you do not have comprehensive cover, or your policy does not cover additional drivers, you will need to add additional named drivers to your policy. However, adding your younger, less experienced children to your policy will definitely make the premiums more expensive. This is because you are adding a category of drivers to your policy that insurers consider high risk: young, inexperienced motorists.

The more additional named drivers you attach to your policy, the more expensive it will be. So it you have several members of your family who wish to drive the van, you will be looking at some very high premiums indeed, especially if they are considered higher risks to your insurance company than you are.

Lending to Friends

There will probably come a time when a friend asks you for the loan of your van on a temporary basis. He may only want to borrow it for a day or two, to take some old furniture to the local recycling facility or move one of his children into their university accommodation. Adding this friend to your policy and steadily increasing premium does not seem worthwhile, but there is a method to ensure he has insurance and that it does not affect your premium.

In these circumstances, many people choose to take out a separate short-term policy to cover the person they are lending their van to for a specific length of time. This way, your individual premium would not be affected, but your friend would be covered in the event of an accident or other untoward incident while in your van. If something does happen, and your friend has to make a claim, it will not affect any no claims bonus you have built up as he is on a separate policy.

You could also use short-term policies to cover temporary drivers you might have hired if you use your van for work purposes. If you suddenly have an influx of work and need to take on temporary employees quickly, this type of insurance might be a good way to cover them without adding them as additional named drivers on your policy or settling for simple third party cover from your comprehensive insurance policy.

There is another very good reason why you might want to consider adding additional cover to your policy. If other drivers have lower risk than you in the eyes of your insurance company, your premium may actually go down. This might work out best if you are a young, inexperienced driver and add a parent with a good driving record to your policy. Because your parent is deemed a statistically safer driver than you, it will have a positive effect on your premium rates.

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