Insurance claim help

[Thebug]

Last year a cyclist went down the side of my car, luckily I had dash cam footage, I sent this to the insurance along with the details left by the cyclist, the insurance viewed this and came back to me and said it was 100% his fault as I had stopped and he came out from round a van off the path on the wrong side of the road.

The insurance tried to contact him using the details he gave but had no success, so could not claim the money for repairs from him so I had to go through my own insurance, they have now told me I need to put it down as a fault claim when doing quotes/ renewals.

Is this correct? I know I have had to go through my own insurance, but I was told I was not at fault all along.

 

[Gaygle]

This is correct. "Fault" is a bit of a misnomer.

What it actually means is that if your insurance company can recover all of the costs from the other person's insurance, then it will go down as a "non fault". If they can't, then it will go down as "fault".

For example, if someone rammed into the rear of my car over night, and drove off and I never found out who it was, for the reasons above, this would go down on my insurance as a "fault" claim even though I clearly wasn't at "fault"

 

[Hades]

Yep as above this is unfortunately correct. A "fault" claim isn't actually about fault but about whose policy the payout was from. In this case your policy had to pay.

I had a very similar thing about 20 years ago. A cyclist accidentally scratched the side of my car while I was parked and sitting in it. The cyclist gave me her details but then the boyfriend tried to convince me to call him instead, handing me his name and number on a bit of paper, and take her details back. Luckily I refused and kept both sets of details because his turned out to be false. She then ignored all contact so I started small claims court proceedings against her. As part of the small claims process of swapping evidence the boyfriend wrote a letter saying he was with her the whole time and she didn't contact the car. But he dun goofed again as the first name on his evidence signature could be overlaid exactly on the first name of the details he'd given me at the scene but with different surnames. It was obvious he was lying and this would have come out in court. I think they realised this once they got my evidence pack and she settled out of court just days before the date. I did get a bit of abuse on the phone from her mum for allegedly bullying and harassing her though (which I certainly didn't do - they were lying again). The amount wasn't huge but by this time it became a matter of principle to sue her.

Didn't go through insurance for the exact reason you mentioned. I didn't want a fault claim against me whatever the outcome.