I read in my last IAM group newsletter an article entitled “Uninsured drivers cost motorists £1.25 million a year”. The article quoted a representative of Brake, saying it was “shocking” that there were so many young people driving without insurance.
I must disagree. If one were to call it “unfortunate” or even “unacceptable” that there are so many young people driving without insurance, that would be a different matter, but “shocking” I cannot agree with. “Shocking” implies surprise. It implies that we should not expect this to be the case. If we really think about it though, it’s not surprising whatsoever.
Why then, are we shocked? Only because it’s easier to point fingers, than to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. That’s not to put too much blame the other way – it can be genuinely difficult for a middle-aged person to understand why anyone would drive uninsured, lest out of malice. This is generally because they cannot see themselves ever being even tempted to do the same. Unfortunately, unless people do start to look at things from the other side, this issue will never be solved.
So as a young person, why would I risk driving without insurance? At this point your typical tabloid subscriber chimes in with “because young people just don’t care” or something about the youth of today having “no respect”. Unfortunately, attitudes like this are just making the problem worse. In truth, your typical young personal does care. I’m not saying there aren’t significant exceptions, but I’m taking about the majority here. Most young people will try to do the right thing unless given a reason not to.
So back to the question – and there’s two inherent motivations to consider: the motivation to drive and the motivation to do so without insurance. The motivation to drive is important to consider, since without this being strongly present, any obstacle to insurance would result in simply not driving. For most young people, this motivation is strong: once they turn 17, their peers will all be learning to drive and buying cars. Driving also represents a significant milestone of independence – particularly for those who live a few miles out of town. As they go to work or university, driving also becomes a major practical requirement for many. In many ways this isn’t a bad thing – since younger people tend to learn quicker, it’s good to allow them to get a few miles under their belts and gain experience.
So the motivation to not take out insurance? Unsurprisingly, the issue here is money. What is surprising is quite how much. We’re not taking about greedily wanting to keep a few extra rounds down the pub each month. I myself know first hand – for a couple of years I paid just over three thousand pounds per year on car insurance.
That’s not the worst of it though. However steep that figure might seem to an older reader, it gets worse when you factor in the difference in earnings. If you consider that the average 17 – 24 year old earns less than £14k, £11k after tax, that £3k suddenly seems like a whole lot more. I have friends earning as little as £8k per year – after paying their rent, bills and basic living costs, car insurance pretty much finishes them off. They’re not 17 either, but 21. The situation can only be worse for those younger – earning less and with even more extortionate insurance.
Let’s now imagine the situation for a 17 year old, living in a deprived inner city area. Lower than average earnings and a high crime rate lessen the gap between earnings and cost of insurance even more. For some of these young people, I can only imagine that a car insurance quote would exceed their income! I am certainly not saying it’s right for people like this to drive without insurance, but in all honesty I can see why they do.
So what do the insurance companies say? They tell us to get smaller, cheaper, older cars. Well, I ran the quotes myself and I can’t say I found it to make all that much difference. If I trade my Audi for an Insurance Group 1 Fiat Seicento it reduces my insurance by around 15%. This is still extortionate and simply not worth the difference. Interestingly enough, IAM Surety were unable to give me a lower quote on that car than what I pay on the Audi.
Still, for those who do need to scrape every last penny they can off (and that’s most young people these days), they end up driving the small, old cars they’re pushed towards. So now young drivers, as if they weren’t unsafe enough, end up driving cars with small wheels, poor handling, inferior impact protection and lacking safety features such as ABS, ESP and traction control. Is this what we really want? To force our children into rust-buckets we wouldn’t drive ourselves?
Of course, there is no claims bonus, which does help after a few years of driving, but, this is a circular issue: if you can’t afford to get insured because you don’t have NCB, you can’t ever build up NCB. The other issue with NCB is that years really aren’t a good measure of driving experience; it’s possible to cover 1000 or 50000 miles in a year. You can rack up NCB by just insuring something you don’t even drive, then 5 years later, jump in and start driving having done nothing but forget most of what you learned for your driving test.
The attitude of insurance to mileage doesn’t help either – more mileage, more risk, more cost; no factoring in the experience gained from those miles. In fact, the miles I spent on observed drives, improving my driving, added to the mileage I pay more for on my insurance. I appreciate the fact that the more miles you spend on the road in a year, the more chances you have to have an accident, but more miles covered the previous year should count in your favour – especially if some are spent honing Advanced Driving techniques.
So really, it’s not “shocking” at all that there are so many uninsured young drivers – it’s logical. I can only consider myself lucky that I have the means to legally drive a safe, reliable car. Even for me however, it’s still incredibly frustrating, that having worked towards being an Advanced Driver, I’m still left paying more for insurance than some of the worst drivers I know. That’s the true frustration – not that my insurance is so high, but that nothing I do, no improvement to my driving ability, can change that.
This needs to change. Two birds can and should be killed with one stone. If we can present advanced driving as a way for young people to develop their driving skills, prove themselves and then reap the benefit through insurance that represents their new driving ability, we really can make a difference to young drivers. The power to do this unfortunately lies with the insurance companies, who seem quite content with their all-stick, no-carrot approach.
So what can be done? In many ways what I’d like to see is a graded driving test, retaken periodically or voluntarily – insurance companies could then base their risk levels directly on proven driving skill. The money from test fees could in part be ploughed back in to organisations like the IAM, to benefit future driver training.
On another front, some insurance companies already use trackers to charge for extra mileage covered – perhaps these could also give benefit in future, for accident-free miles covered in the past? NCB measured in miles rather than years would more accurately represent time behind the wheel.
These are just suggestions, but we do need to find a better way, because with insurance prices going up and the recession not doing much for incomes, we can’t be surprised to encounter even more uninsured young drivers. I’m not advocating subsidisation on a plate, only a system that is fairer to those who make the effort.