Is your business reliant on multiple vehicles? Is arranging insurance a challenge? Fleet insurance could be the answer for your business!
What is fleet insurance?
In the UK it is a legal requirement to insure your vehicle. This can prove to be challenging if you’re a business owner with multiple vehicles in your fleet, as you might have to juggle different insurance policies. Fortunately, there is a much easier way of insuring – fleet insurance covers a fleet of vehicles. These can be registered in the name of the business, a partner or the director of the business – allowing one policy to cover your whole business. In the long term, this will save the headache when trying to renew your insurance and it could wind up saving you some money!
How many vehicles count as a fleet?
The general amount of vehicles that insurers will class as a fleet does vary between insurance companies. Most will clearly set out a minimum and a maximum number of vehicles. Generally speaking, the minimum amount is two, although only specialists tend to offer cover for this amount. The maximum can be in the thousands of vehicles.
What vehicles will be covered by fleet insurance?
Again, this will be set out by your insurance provider, as not all fleet insurance providers are the same – but many will be flexible with the sorts of vehicles that they are willing to cover. A wide variety of business uses are covered, including; courier, private hire, haulage and other transportation purposes. You are also able to cover a mixture of vehicles although, if an insurer has an ‘any vehicle’ policy, it’s worth doing some research and checking which specific vehicles are covered. Occasionally, vehicles such as motorbikes, excavators and forklift trucks can be excluded.
Taxi firms are slightly different, as they would need to have either public or private cover.
What are the pros of fleet insurance?
With only having to remember one insurance renewal date, one of the main pros is that you’ll be able to save a lot of time on admin. A business might also be eligible for a discount as they’ll be bulk buying from a single supplier.
There’s also the opportunity to insure all drivers on every single vehicle in the fleet, under what’s known as an ‘any driver’ policy. This means that all drivers will have access to all vehicles, which can save them time waiting around for a specific vehicle to be free to use.
What are the cons of fleet insurance?
The premiums of all vehicles could be affected if one driver is particularly accident-prone. But the odd bump shouldn’t have much of an effect on the premiums. However, if you do have one particularly accident-prone driver, it might be worth putting them on a separate policy.
Often, with fleets, vehicles can change. If you don’t keep your policy up-to-date with information then when you go to make a claim it could be invalid.
Types of cover
In terms of the type of cover, the options are similar to those of standard car insurance.
- Third party; is the legal minimum amount of cover. This policy helps to protect other people if an accident was one of your driver’s faults. What isn’t covered is damage to your own vehicles or any injuries you might suffer.
- Comprehensive will cover any damage to your own vehicles.
