Accident at roundabout

[michael769]

1) Tell your insurer immediately. You have a contract of utmost good faith. They can tell you they want to ignore it if they want to ignore it.

Indeed. Insurance contracts require that you reveal all material facts. Any accident is material to an insurance policy.

I've found it hard to accept that an insurance company can decide that it is "my fault" that the other party has no insurance.

They don't. If the circumstances are such that you are not to blame it will get recorded as a no-fault claim regardless of the other parties insurance status.

Vandalism and the like claims do not have any distinction between fault and no-fault as it is entirely irrelevant. Unfortunately some of the web based forms you see are quite inflexible and sometimes force to select blame/no-blame for irrelevant cases (one of my pet hates esp. as my insurance is soon due for renewal)

What causes confusion in this area is that people equate fault/no-fault with loosing or keeping their NCD, but an NCD is a no claim bonus rather than a no blame bonus, so it is perfectly possible to lose your NCD in a no fault claim.

W.r.t the OP's collision. I would tend towards the view that is is 50:50. Why?

As the OP was taking an incorrect (under The Highway Code) path through the roundabout - if his vehicle was not visible to the van driver after passing the proceeding exit (could the OP have been in the van's very substantial blind spots at that point?) the driver of the van might conclude that the OP's vehicle had left the roundabout and therefor it was safe to change lanes - which I suspect is what happened here. The OP having taken the incorrect path could reasonably be expected to be prepared for the van being unaware of his presence by avoiding spending any time alongside or in the van's blind spots.

On the other hand drivers regularly experience other vehicles taking incorrect paths through roundabouts,and the OP's signal should (assuming it was visible to the van driver at any time) have given the van driver a warning that the OPs vehicle was liable to take an unexpected path, and so he should have taken extra care to check that the OP had actually left the roundabout at the preceding exit, and that it was clear to change lanes (personally I would have staid behind the OP where I could keep an eye on him until I saw him leave the roundabout).

For me the key take home from G v T is the expectation that drivers on roundabouts should be aware of what is going on around them and be able to cope with other road users making errors.

There is a certain element of bad luck in collisions like this - as pretty much everybody I know makes these type of errors from time to time - most of the time we are fortunate enough to get away with it!

[MGF]

I think there might be some confusion between 'fault' and a 'non-fault' claim where the insurance company are unable to recover their payment to the policyholder.

Someone drove into the rear of my car last year at traffic lights. He was - ostensibly - insured however only as a named driver. His ins. co. decided to void his insurance as they believed he was the main driver. Legally they are still liable to compensate me but they would only do so when I got a CCJ against the other driver. This took over a year to resolve and in the meantime I had to renew my insurance. I did this online and noted there was a £20 difference between premiums when I declared the non-fault accident without recovery of the money from my insurance company and, on the other hand when I did declare it. (I submitted the claim with the correct declaration and paid the extra).

The point is my premium was more because I had claimed on my insurance even though it was not my fault. Compare this with a fault accident I had some years ago. Lost a couple of years no claims but the premium remained the same on renewal two weeks later. When I asked why the accident had not affected my premium (less the loss of bonus) I was told the insurance company didn't consider occasional accidents as an increased risk.