Inertia selling Professional indemnity Insurance

[Gentile]

I've just received an "invoice" for a new period of Professional Indemnity and Employers' Liability insurance, from the company I had taken out twelve months' limited cover with last year.

What is it with these bozos in the insurance industry? It's bad enough that they get away with blatant inertia selling of car insurance. (I can only imagine they make sufficient contributions to political parties to make it worthwhile for lawmakers to turn a blind eye to that blatant scam). But this is the first time someone has tried to inertia sell me any form of business insurance under that same "automatic renewal" scam.

At least with car insurance I can and do make sure I write "I do not agree to further periods of insurance without my explicit consent being sought for each proposed period of insurance" on my proof of no claims documentation. (Which they invariably ignore the next year, then sheepishly pay me compensation rather than risk me complaining to the FSA when I point out they've ignored my explicit instructions and attempted to auto-renew without my consent).

Any of you found this with your own insurers? There really should be a consumer pressure group lobbying on this. It's every bit as bad as the mis-selling of payment protection insurance and utility deals that banks and utility companies respectively were into a few years back.

[cojak]

Qdos sends out a reminder but explicitly states that it does not automatically renew, you have to do that yourself.

I did of course.

I rather liked that.

[northernladuk]

Qdos sends out a reminder but explicitly states that it does not automatically renew, you have to do that yourself.

I did of course.

I rather liked that.

They don't half ring you a lot as it approaches as though

[Rabotnik]

I actually had this with BT. I wanted to check when my landline contract was up, and the agent said it had been automatically renewed for another year. I said that can't be legal, they just went and signed me up to another contract without my consent. The agent tried to get me to back down by saying I'd agreed to automatic annual renewal when I signed up, but I wasn't having it.

Eventually he said he would go check with his manager for me, and after a while he came back and said that there was a ruling in 2010 (I think), which said phone providers could no longer automatically renew customers' contracts without their consent, so he put me on a one month rolling contract instead.

They must be continuing to do this on the sly unless a customer complains. They didn't even send me a letter saying my contract was about to expire/be renewed.

[Gentile]

Qdos sends out a reminder but explicitly states that it does not automatically renew, you have to do that yourself.

I did of course.

I rather liked that.

I wouldn't mind that in the slightest. It's the fact this lot had the cheek to invoice me, rather than send me a quote, that I object to. I checked the T&Cs (which I'm usually quite thorough about at the time of signing), and sure enough there was nothing in there that would have authorised auto-renewal.

It seems the insurance industry can't get enough of selling their products without explicit consent. Auto-renewal of car insurance, auto-enrolment in pension schemes, and now this. I bet other industries would love to get away with the same trick.

Imagine if by shopping at Tescos one week, they assumed that meant they had the right to deliver groceries to your door whenever they liked. Then had the cheek to suggest it was in your own interests, since you need food and it would avoid you starving to death. That's about the level of justification these numpties use for pushing unwanted insurance products on consumers. Because otherwise we'd just be too dumb to make our own informed choices about which insurance and pension products we wanted to buy.

[Gentile]

I actually had this with BT. I wanted to check when my landline contract was up, and the agent said it had been automatically renewed for another year. I said that can't be legal, they just went and signed me up to another contract without my consent. The agent tried to get me to back down by saying I'd agreed to automatic annual renewal when I signed up, but I wasn't having it.

Eventually he said he would go check with his manager for me, and after a while he came back and said that there was a ruling in 2010 (I think), which said phone providers could no longer automatically renew customers' contracts without their consent, so he put me on a one month rolling contract instead.

They must be continuing to do this on the sly unless a customer complains. They didn't even send me a letter saying my contract was about to expire/be renewed.

I did a gig for a company that runs telephone support lines on behalf of the NHS a couple of years back. They had terrible problems with the underhanded 'sales' tactics of large telecommunications companies. Just about every single month, they'd find that one or another of the large telcos had transferred the whole organisation's phone lines over to their own control without consent (that's about 1,000 lines). It was called phone slamming.

There was one poor guy whose job it was just to make sure that nobody had done it to them again. Whenever the company complained, they were told by the telcos' tame "watchdog" Ofcom that there was nothing they could do about such blatant fraud by those organisations they're meant to police. Strangely enough, many of Ofcom's board are ex-directors of those very same telcos, and will receive their pensions from them. Not much of a conflict of interest there then.

[Qdos Contractor]

This is an interesting and timely thread. We were just looking into the possibility of bringing in automatic renewals, but strictly on a very clear 'opt-in' basis. Unlike the OP's experience, we would give plenty of warning prior to expiry with ample opportunity to cancel or change the terms.

Obviously there's no point in spending the time setting the system up if nobody will use it, so I'd be interested to know people's thoughts.

We do tend to get a lot of people who genuinely forget to renew, despite us sending out lots of reminders, so that's the rationale behind it.

It would also free up more time for our nice ladies to call NLUK even more...

[d000hg]

Aren't they legally required to give you a cooling-off period meaning that even if they send you an invoice, you can just phone up and say you don't want it?

Calling it a scam is not accurate. It is reasonable to expect a business is going to need cover long-term not for a single year, and a business does NOT want gaps in PI cover because sod's law says the week you're not covered is the week something goes wrong. If you're running a business it's your responsibility to be on top of these things - set a reminder in your calendar for a week before it is due to expire is all it takes.

[darmstadt]

Nearly everything in Germany is like that. You subscribe to a magazine, TV channel, telephone provider, etc. they will automatically renew unless you write to them 3 months before the possible end of contract. My PI insurance though doesn't, they send me a form which states what cover I have and to make any changes if necessary. If I don't reply then they renew (Hiscox).