advice please on UK car insurers

[Frank]

Hi

Not sure if this has been discussed before, but here goes.  I will be returning to the UK for approx 6-12mths and will be taking my French registered car with me.  I will no longer have a property in France, so effectively, I will be non french resident.  With this in mind, are there any UK car insurers who will insure a french reg car in the short term whilst I do the neccessary paperwork to get it registered in the UK, or does anyone know of a French company who will insure on a UK address, please.  The car isn't worth a lot, but is a very good runner!  Many thanks in advance for any help/advice

[dave21478]

Its probably not the RIGHT thing to do, but if I were you, I would just leave the French insurance on it until I had re-registered it in UK and if anybody asked any questions, I would quote my old French address as my place of residence.

Bearing in mind that it is technically not legal for a UK resident to drive a foreign registered car at all, this is probably the easiest solution.

[YCCMB]

If I had a quid for every long term UK resident that was still driving a car registered in their country of origin, I'd be very, very wealthy. I'd hate to be involved in an accident with one and test the validity of their insurance (whether they're insured in the UK or their country of origin, I don't know). As I've said before on here, a colleague at my local college, who has lived in the UK long enough to have two school-age children - born and raised here - and to have got married here is still driving round in her French-registered car. I suspect she must have found someone to insure it in the UK as she has no address in France.

[derf]

Your French insurer probably won't allow you to cancel, without proof of new insurance[:D] and providing you give them a contact address in France, you should be OK to drive in the UK until you get new insurance and registration.

Les

[AnOther]

Your insure should let you cancel when you tell them that you have moved to UK, moving is one of the circumstances in which you can cancel mid term - if they don't cancel it themselves because of it.

If they won't play then simply tell them that you have sold the car and send them a made up certificate de cession naming anybody you like (real or imaginary) as the new owner.

As stated technically you are not permitted to drive your car on the road in UK on foreign plates dftguide.pdf

Good luck with finding an insurer, you're far from the first to have to wrestle with that problem.

[EuroTrash]

I can't see your insurer making any difficulties over cancelling if you explain that you have moved to the UK AND provide evidence that you have insured it in the UK.

If you send in a bogus certificat de cession, it will make it extremely difficult for an unwary new owner to register it in France. I don't think it's very clever to do that to anybody.

[AnOther]

[quote user="EuroTrash"]If you send in a bogus certificat de cession, it will make it extremely difficult for an unwary new owner to register it in France.[/quote]How so ?

Firstly I'm saying send one to the insurance company not the prefecture. Apart from them accepting it as 'proof' that the car has been sold, and therefore cancel the insurance, they will do absolutely nothing else with it except file it away with the clients dossier to gather dust.

Secondly, the OP has declared his intent to UK register the car - insurance for that was the question - and in the highly unlikely event that following that it somehow found it's way back to France again since it would be on UK plates re-registering it there again would be a matter of exactly the same routine as for a freshly imported car and the fact that it was once in the past French registered will have no bearing on that whatsoever.

I have personally been through exactly that scenario, French car bought registered and used in France, later exported to UK and registered there, then finally brought back to France where I bought it still on it's UK plates. Despite having a photocopy of the original Carte Grise the registration followed exactly the same procedure as each of the other half dozen cars I have imported and registered the sole difference being in this case that I did manage to persuade the prefecture that due to it's French origins there really was no need for Certificate of Conformity.

As I said though the certificat de cession would only be an alternative to the insurer being uncooperative in cancelling for reasons permitted in law which broadly speaking include such things as:

- Change of residence;

- Change in marital status;

- Change of matrimonial regime;

- Change of occupation;

- Occupational retirement or termination of employment