Credit hire bills are won or lost on the first notification

I think most credit hire overspend is fixed long before a solicitor opens the file, and the market keeps celebrating the wrong moment.

I would spend the next pound of credit hire budget at first notification before I spent it on another defence.

Last week’s obvious headline was a courtroom win. Horwich Farrelly said on 28 October that its Northern Ireland team and 1st Central had defended in full a credit hire claim valued at about £130,000, with proceedings discontinued and savings of more than £165,000 including damages and costs, according to HF’s announcement. A good result. It is also the most expensive way to get one.

The more useful story ran in Insurance Business on 3 November. Chris Clapp of basic hire rate provider All-Rates said storage charges used to attach to roughly 15 to 20 per cent of credit hire cases, at around £35 a day. He now sees them on about 35 per cent of claims, routinely at £50 a day and as high as £100.

That is the figure I would put in front of a claims director. Storage runs by the day whether anyone is watching or not.

The warning signs he describes are ordinary. A taxi or motorcycle on the other side. A fault notification with no credit hire notification attached. A crash reported weeks late, often where the car has been written off. Those claims fall outside the ABI General Terms of Agreement far more often, and there the claimant’s daily rate has no ceiling.

His advice on late files was blunt: make a without prejudice payment and stop the running costs rather than fight over them. He also said claims teams too often accept a report that no comparable hire rates exist for taxis and bikes, when the evidence is usually just harder to find.

None of that needs a court.

How many claims teams could say today how many open fault claims have a hire company behind them that they have not yet heard from?