HOW GOOD IS YOUR INSURANCE?
Article by Rob Finlayson City Cars Glasgow
rob@citycarsglasgow.co.uk
The old saying is you get what you pay for, and there’s no market that quite echoes that like insurance. For a small taxi or private hire fleet, insurance is one of your biggest bills of the year. When your renewal arrives, the premium naturally receives most of the attention. A significant saving can make a real difference to your figures, particularly when operators are already dealing with rising vehicle, maintenance, licensing, energy and staffing costs, and for those owner- operators, skyrocketing fuel prices.
However, the cheapest premium is not always the cheapest insurance. A policy may provide the required minimum legal cover and still be completely unsuitable for the day-to-day needs of the operator and the business. If adding a driver to your policy takes nearly a week whilst your broker ums and ahs with your underwriter for approval, changing a vehicle becomes an ordeal that eats up your time, or critical documents cannot be produced accurately or correctly, that apparent saving can disappear very quickly. Sometimes, you do get exactly what you pay for.
A small fleet cannot absorb unnecessary delays
Larger organisations may have multiple spare vehicles, dedicated compliance teams and enough recruitment activity to absorb occasional delays. Smaller fleets and owner-operators don’t have that luxury. Every vehicle needs to be out earning its keep. Every suitable driver who crosses the threshold matters. Managers are usually covering several responsibilities at once, and time spent chasing an insurer is time taken away from being hands-on and actually running the business.
If a vehicle is sitting idle while paperwork is being processed, it’s a dead asset. The operator is losing money. If a prospective driver is waiting for an insurance referral, the operator risks losing that driver to a competitor who spent that little bit more to go with an insurance company that is more proactive. This is why service times matter just as much as the bottom-line premium. When did you last assess your insurance quotation based on turnaround KPIs or average response times?
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For a modern private hire or taxi operation, we simply cannot afford to accept poor service standards. Experience shows us that poor service isn’t just a once- in-a-blue-moon affair. It’s something that is endemic in the insurance industry. When delays or errors hit, it’s the operators who end up bearing the cost, and that isn’t listed on the breakdown of your premium.
Set out your stall
The most frustrating failures are those that could have been avoided. Before an operator enters an insurance arrangement, both operator and broker really should establish how the business actually works and what it needs from its policy and the service supporting it.
How many vehicles does the business operate? What are the plans for the coming year in terms of fleet scale and size, and how often are you likely to be changing vehicles? Are drivers employed, self-employed or a mixture of both? What unique challenges and peculiarities does the operator face with its licensing authorities?
This leans particularly into what documentation the operator requires. A certificate that is technically valid may still be rejected by a licensing authority because of local variations and edge-case issues relating to that particular working area’s licensing conditions.
These conversations should all be had before a premium is even discussed. Too many operators and brokers are guilty of focusing on the bottom number rather than the correct product for the operation.
Operators must be honest and specific about their requirements. In this case, they are the subject-matter experts on their own licensing area. A broker may cover the entirety of the UK market, but only an operator knows the day-to-day peculiarities of its own licensing authority.
The exchange of knowledge needs to work both ways, though. The operator understands its local licensing system and its quirks, while the broker should bring a broad knowledge of the insurance market to the table, including the appetite of its panel of underwriters and the practical limits of each product it offers.
The correct policy is usually found somewhere in the middle, where these two knowledge bases meet. Problems begin when either side makes assumptions and doesn’t ask questions.
OCTOBER 2026 PHTM
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