Will your insurance claim be settled quickly after the Liverpool car park fire? It seems likely that in most cases, it will. Here’s the latest updates:
- LV, Tesco, Admiral, Makerstudy, More Than and NFU have all waived Excess charges.
- Around one third of claims settled within a few days of the fire by AXA
- Aviva has already settled half the 123 claims it has received
- Liverpool Council has a Contact form, so vehicle owners can stay updated on all information concerning the fire and its aftermath – find it here.
The UK insurance industry has already responded rapidly to one of the biggest fires over the Christmas and New Year break, when over 1000 cars were completely destroyed in a car park fire near the Echo Arena venue. The car park itself will have to be demolished, once the burnt out vehicles have been removed and the fire service investigation is completed.
Meanwhile Liverpool City Mayor Joe Anderson told the local press that he had written to the ABI asking for an `extraordinary response’ to the fire, with claims being settled as quickly as possible. In fact the ABI issued a press release on the same day as the Liverpool Echo ran the story pointing out that hundreds of claims had already been settled.
Insurance Edge spoke to the ABI (Association of British Insurers) who commented;
“Members have been telling us that they have teams of loss adjusters on the ground and we expect to see cross-industry co-operation on the identification of vehicles and processing claims. It is a major incident and we expect to have more updates next week.”
We approached several insurers and brokers active in the motor insurance sector.
Justin Beddows from Admiral commented;
“From our point of view the priority has been dealing with the claims as a matter of urgency and to try and get settlements out to customers as quickly as possible. We have a dedicated team assessing and processing the claims and even some of our managers are getting involved and settling the claims. We don’t have full chatbots or AI for the first notification of loss stage, but we do have web forms in Claims so customers could submit their claims to us out of hours and we could start dealing with them at 8.00am on 2nd January. This has mean we have managed to make payments for some claims already, in fact we had one claim registered at 8.30 on Tuesday morning and we had agreed a settlement with the customer by 11.30, we then arranged electronic payment into their account the same day.”
Admiral also confirmed on Twitter that they are waiving any excess charges and stated that customers making a claim following the fire will not lose any NCD.
An AXA spokesperson also told us that their claims settlement process was well underway;
“In the past four days we have already settled a third of all claims arising from the Liverpool car park fire. In large events such as these, it is so important that customers get the best advice and service as quickly as possible and as such we created dedicated customer service teams pulling in some of our most experienced claims handlers. We have been working closely with our third party suppliers to get the best solution as quickly as possible and are liaising directly with the ABI to ensure we are working in-line with other insurers.”
Anne Kirk at Swinton also added;
“We’re working with our insurance partners to reach out to people who have been impacted by this event. We would encourage our customers to contact us over the phone, through social media or at their local branch to discuss a potential claim.”
More updates on this story soon.
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