As homeowners in one Surrey town find themselves having to spend more time than usual on home insurance comparison sites to find cheap home insurance, the whole question of how insurers set their premiums is once again brought up.
Massive increase but why?
The Surrey town of Dorking has been revealed as the town that as seen the biggest increase in home insurance online quotes over the last year. The poor homeowners of Dorking have, according to a well known online comparison site, Moneysupermarket, seen their premiums rise from £119 to £174, a massive increase of 46%. The real problem is no one can explain it. A spokesman for the site that came up with the figures explained that the rise could be explained by a combination of factors, listing bad weather events, high crime incidence and high levels of fraudulent claims, however, the statistics don’t back that up.
No increase in house crime
The website police.co.uk that was launched in a blaze of publicity just before Christmas and claimed to give the public more insight into the levels of crime in their own area shows very little activity for Dorking at all when it comes to house crime. In the three months from December to February there were just 14 burglaries in Dorking, bad enough, you might say but nowhere near a crime wave in a town with a population of 170,000 people.
Weather patterns don’t offer a clue
Investigations at the Meteorological Office show that Dorking suffered the same sort of winter that Surrey as a whole shared, it was cold! But no colder than anywhere else in the area, nor did it suffer freak high winds, storms or lightening strikes out of the ordinary. Further enquiries reveal that insurance companies recorded no significantly high claim pockets in the area.
Residents may have to look elsewhere
There is no doubt that insurers use post codes as one of their tools to work out risk assessment factors and although crime and weather don’t appear to be the cause of the premium hikes, being a Surrey town, Dorking will have its above fair share of wealthy inhabitants, so perhaps that is the reason. No one can be sure, but it is for sure that Dorking homeowners will have to look at saving money on their insurance in other ways. They could of course raise the excess allowance on their policies, they could install security measures around the property, and they could spend more time comparing quotes from a different site.