A Cheque!

The on-going saga of the insurance claim might be entering it's closing phase.

Having been working away for some weeks, it was difficult to get the necessary paperwork together, but eventually it was all sent in & guess what - a cheque arrived! To be fair, Equity did send me a cheque for the recovery immediately after my last outburst, so this was the cheque for the repairs. Hurrah.

On the other hand, from a customer service point of view it’s still not an entirely rosy picture.

Way back, an insurance assessor saw the car, took my estimate, then for some reason fabricated something entirely different & gave authority to proceed with the repair. His estimate was way over what I’d asked for with regard to parts & he’d included a figure of £224 for labour. The total payout by his estimate would be around £2000.

Before paying out for the repair, the insurance Co. wanted an invoice including receipts for the parts, so I sent all that off showing the much lower cost of parts & asking for a nominal £250 for the labour – probably only because I couldn’t remember the actual figure.

The total repair value stood at around £1500, so a £500 saving over the assessor’s estimate.

Yesterday I received a cheque for the parts - & £224 for the labour as that’s what the assessor had said. The princely sum of £26 less than I’d asked for - 10/10 for saving the Co. money, but minus several thousand for irritating the customer.

Last night I sent an e-mail detailing the time taken for every stage of the repair, & pointing out that I’m a mechanical engineer by trade & my employer charges £70/hr for my time, so the labour bill should have been £2030 - & that would amount to a 20% saving as I’m not VAT registered. Even using a more normal motor trade rate of £50/hr, the bill would have been £1450.

 So would they please pay my very reasonable request of £250 (£8.62/hr).

Of course the real irony is that it will cost Equity more than the £26 saving to have someone read my e-mail (it was deliberately quite long) & write a cheque.

 

Let's see what happens.