Beware post-crash bike hire: Law

‘If you have assets, you maynot want to be so gung-ho’

Most of you will have legal expenses insurance bolted onto your bike policy, basically because your insurers want to ‘capture’ your claim and earn money from it. Which can be very bad news. Here’s how it works: you call your insurer, hit the menu button that says you’ve been in a crash and your call is scooped up by a claims management company who will want to get your bike into their approved repairer, rather than your trusted local franchise dealer. They will also want to rack up storage charges and above all they will want to put you on a hire bike for north of £100 a day.

Approved

The next stinger is the approved repairers do not guarantee to use brand new or OEM parts. A second hand swinging arm off another crashed bike does not sound good to me.

At this stage you will wonder why all this is happening? The answer is… money: one insurer drives up a claim another is paying by thousands, even tens of thousands, of pounds of hire, storage and warranty wrecking repairs. Meanwhile the accident management company, often owned by the broker, is enjoying a handy profit. The economics of the mad house for sure. But there is plenty of money to be made. So desperate are these claims management companies to get bikes out on hire for £120 a day that I have had clients, their limbs in plaster, call me to tell me their insurer has sent a couple of guys around in a van with a ‘courtesy’ bike. By the way, that delivery note has a watertight contract attached to it which makes you personally liable for the £120 a day hire. So tread and read carefully. This industry is known as credit hire and one of my sweetest court room moments was having a case dismissed against a motorcyclist, the errant car driver having racked up over £100,000 of ‘credit hire charges’ because, apparently, he needed Porsches and Bentleys while his car underwent the world’s longest repair. All of this accompanied by unusual judicial delight. But I have also seen one poor lad find himself told he was liable for over £50,000 of bike hire and storage charges on a bike which cost less than £1000 to replace, helpfully arranged for him by his insurer. My lad was a tough cookie with no assets so he invited the insurerowned claims company to sue him. But, if you are a homeowner with assets, you may not be so gung-ho.

Send the hire bike back

So, what to do? Do not perjure yourself and send back the hire bike; I think I have recommended a client take a hire bike about once every two years – usually because they need it to get to work, and I invite the other driver’s insurers to provide the bike so my rider does not get hooked into a contract.

You should also contact your own insurer with whom you have your contract. You require your insurer, who has taken premium off you to have your bike repaired at your dealer of choice, especially so if you have a warranty. If the accident was not your fault the other driver’s insurer pays and your no-claims is reinstated. But let’s be clear here, it is a myth that a non-franchised workshop can spanner your bike without invalidating the warranty. That much is true for a passenger car but not true for motorcycles and commercial vehicles.