Car Insurance Company

Dear Sirs,

Thank you so much for your two letters dated 10 July. I have not replied to you before now, because I was on holiday, and couldn't be bothered. I would normally feel quite guilty about this, but, since you don't take any notice when I write to you, I don't feel so bad.

Anyway, the first of your letters confirmed a change to the insured vehicle, which confused me no end, I can tell you, since the vehicle I have now is the same one that I first insured with you on 12 May, and I've had it all the time since then. Your second letter was much more welcome, as it enclosed (finally) my policy documents, for a policy taken out on 12 May - i.e. two months to issue the policy. I welcome the fact that the policy is written in plain English, so that the meaning isn't lost in pages of Gobbledygook. I was so impressed that I thought I would follow your example in this letter.

I only had a 28-day cover note, so I have been driving about since 10 June with no cover note. What took you so long?

You may say "We needed confirmation of your of your NCD entitlement from your previous company car insurers." I sent this to you on 2 June, as soon as I received it. There are 2 important points here :-

(i) My company's car insurers are.. em... YOU! My present private policy is with.. em.. YOU AGAIN! This would seem to rule out the need for a lot of cross-checking (unless you thought their computer was broken too).

ii) Your "second existence" letter of 17 May says that the NCD on my company car was 60% protected. I wrote to you nicely on 2 June, and asked if this could be passed on to you (first incarnation)(I know this is confusing - it's not my fault) to take some account of my driving record. You didn't even bleedin' answer.

If I had written and said that I had been suffering epileptic fits since 14 May, would you have ignored that? If it had turned out that I had accidentally wiped out a bus queue while pissed out of my mind, would you have stuffed that in a file and forgotten about it? I don't think so.

No, you would have got the corporate mask and blunderbuss out of the cupboard, and hot-footed it here on Black Bess to extract another couple of hundred quid (at least) from my kids' piggy-banks.

So how about it, eh? How about reading my letter of 2 June again, and having a wee think about increasing the NCD allowance, and maybe writing to me and telling me what you decide?

Incidentally, just to show that there are no hard feelings, I was speaking to Sir John Harvey-Jones the other day, about his new career since he gave up show-jumping, and we talked about your wee problem here. I can pass on his advice for free (this time).

He says that you should promote the man who looks after collecting the monthly premiums by direct debit - this bit was dealt with most efficiently - the second premium had disappeared from my bank account nearly a fortnight before the rest of you had even told me fully (in the policy) what I was paying for. This man should obviously be given extra responsibility, for customer liaison, for answering letters, and for making sure that you don't waste time processing unnecessary and non-existent changes. This might also help you to issue policy documents a bit more quickly.

Sir John also thinks that you should change your slogan from "We won't make a drama out of a crisis" to "We will make a complete dog's breakfast of a perfectly simple transaction, even when no third parties are involved, but don't write to us about it, because we might not answer." Less punchy, admittedly, but these Trading Standards guys and TV consumer programmes are getting ever so keen these days.

Enough of Sir John. I think you should make a new telly advert. I keep seeing wee red phones with wheels, and guys with outrageously oversized spectacles. You could have Sir Bob Geldof playing a respectable government minister who knocks a newspaper delivery boy off his bicycle on his way to the House (of Commons, that is, not the house that ordered the newspaper) with the new slogan "Crisis? - You probably won't even f****** notice." Topical and catchy, I think you'll agree.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully