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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has introduced new rules to make insurance pricing fairer for existing customers.
The new rules mean that insurers must offer the same price to both new and existing customers.
Insurers used to offer better deals to attract new customers, which meant existing customers at renewal were often faced with a more expensive quote – this is called the ‘loyalty tax’ or ‘loyalty penalty’.
With the new rules this won’t be allowed, so existing customers’ renewal prices will match what is offered to new customers.
Insurers also need to make cancelling your insurance auto-renewal accessible to everyone. For example, companies can’t require that you can only cancel by phone – they have to make other options available, like cancelling online.
For existing customers, this likely means that your renewal price will be cheaper as it falls in line with what new customers are offered. But new customer deals might become more expensive to make up for the loss of the loyalty tax at renewal.
The new rules - part of the General Insurance Pricing Practices (GIPP) – come into effect on 1 January 2022.
Insurers must offer the same price to both new and renewing customers for:
It’ll also affect products sold alongside the above. For example, if an insurer offers new customers free breakdown cover, then renewing customers must also be offered the same benefit.
If you change your details at renewal – say you have a change of address or you want to include a policy add-on – or if you’ve made a claim, then your insurer can charge you a different price because your level or risk has changed.
Just because your insurer might be offering you a cheaper renewal price than you’d expected doesn’t mean there aren’t more suitable deals available.
Why settle for a price from only one insurer when you could compare many prices and potentially save more?
It’s still just as important to shop around and recompare to see what other deals are out there.
Maybe. But offers like our free £250 free excess cover will still be available, so there could be even more value for money to be had by using comparison sites.
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