Terms & conditions

County Insurance Consultants Ltd, trading as Heath & Blackshaw, Wilmslow Insurance, Insure Taxi & Insure Courier registered in England and Wales number 4787941. We act as an independent insurance intermediary and are authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority, Number 305560, in the arranging and selling of General Insurance policies. You may check our authorised status by visiting the FSA website @ www.fsa.gov.co.uk or by calling them on 0845 606 1234.

Our Service - In arranging insurance for our customers, we act as an independent intermediary. Our service includes advising you on your insurance needs, making a fair analysis before recommending and arranging your insurance cover with an insurer, and helping you with any ongoing changes you have to make. We will also assist you wherever possible in making a claim.

Disclosure – It is your responsibility to provide complete and accurate information to insurers when taking out your insurance policy, throughout the life of your policy and when you renew the policy. Failure to disclose information pertaining to your insurance, or any inaccuracies in information given, could result in your policy being invalid or cover not operating fully.

It is therefore very important that you ensure that all statements you make on proposal forms, claim forms and other documents are full and accurate. If the form is completed on your behalf, you should check all the answers shown to the relevant questions are true and accurate before signing the document.

You are reminded that it is an offence under the road traffic act to make any false statements or to withhold any relevant information to obtain a certificate of motor insurance.

You are advised to keep copies of any correspondence you send to us or direct to your insurers.

If you are in any doubt about whether information is material, you should disclose it.

Confidentiality and Data Protection – All personal and sensitive information about our customers is treated as private and confidential.

We will only use and disclose the information we have about a customer, in the normal course of arranging and administering their insurances and will not disclose any information to any other parties without their consent. Unless we are notified of any changes by you, we will assume that the personal and sensitive information we hold on you is correct and continue to use this to provide quotations when the policy falls due for renewal or as and when the risk requires review.

We may pass information about you to credit reference agencies and insurers or other intermediaries for the purpose of arranging payments by instalments and arranging cover we may also pass to them details of your payment record to us. Under the Data Protection Act 1998, individuals have a right to see personal information about them held in our records. A charge may be made for this service. If you wish to exercise this right, or have any related queries, you should write to us at the above address.

Motor and Home Insurance Anti-Fraud Registers – Insures share information with each other via the claims and underwriting exchange register and motor insurance anti-fraud and theft register to aid the prevention of fraudulent claims.

In the event of a claim, the information you supply on the claim form together with any other information relating to the claim will be put on the registers.

Motor Insurance Information Centre – Insurers are legally required to provide details of all motor insurance policies to the MIIC. The information describing your insurance cover will be added to the Motor Insurance Database (MID) to which the police and other government agencies have access. This helps with the pursuance of claims following accidents and aids the detection of those who are in the contravention of the law by not taking out insurance.

Use for Marketing Purposes – We may use information held about you to provide information about other products and services which we feel may be of interest to you. We may do this by telephone, email, post or other means.

You may exercise your right to give notice to stop data being processed for marketing purposes by contacting us at any time. Please do this in writing.

Claims – We may have no authority to handle claims on behalf of insurers. In the event of an incident occurring, which may give rise to a claim under your policy, you should notify your insurer using the relevant claims help line numbers given to you.

Alternatively you may contact us on our telephone number and we will then on receipt of notification of an incident, which may give rise to a claim under your policy, inform the insurer as soon as is reasonably practical and in any circumstances no later than seven days from the day of receipt.

We shall use our best endeavours when acting on your behalf in relation to a claim, to handle all elements of the claim in due care, skill and diligence.

If we consider it to be in your interests, then we may pass data held by us to a third party to deal with a claim on your/our behalf.

We will advise you promptly of the insurer’s requirements concerning claims including the provision as soon as possible, of information required to establish the nature of the extent of a loss.

If there is any conflict of interest, we shall only handle a claim on your behalf after we have disclosed to you all the information you require to enable you to decide whether to give your informed consent, and you have given that consent.

We will forward payments received from insurers, in respect of a claim, to you without delay on receipt of any outstanding balance being settled in full by you on any finance agreement that you have in force with us relating to the said policy.

We will notify you of any request for any information that we receive from your insurers.

Complaints – It is our intention to provide you with the very highest level of customer service at all times. If there are occasions where we do no meet these standards, then please do let us know by contacting our Operations Manager Mrs Lesley Garratt in writing. Please give us details of your concerns and we will then acknowledge your complaints in writing within 5 working days, advising who is dealing with the complaint and timescales in which we expect an outcome. In any event, we will write to you again after 20 days advising the up to date situations.

If you are not happy with the outcome after you have written to ourselves and we have dealt with your complaint, then you can contact the Financial Ombudsman Service, South Quay Plaza, 183 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9SR. Telephone: 0207 676 1000.

We are, covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. You may be entitled to compensation from the scheme if we cannot meet our obligations. This depends on the type of business and the circumstances of the claim. Insurance advising and arranging is covered for 100% of the first £2000 and 90% of the remainder of the claim, without any upper limit. For compulsory classes of insurance, insurance advising and arranging is covered for 100% of the claim, without any upper limit. Further information about compensation scheme arrangements is available from the FSCS on 0207 892 7300 or by visiting, www.fscs.org.uk.

Compliments – It is always nice to hear when a member of our team has done a good job and we feel someone has done something that deserves that extra recognition.

Cancellation Rights (The Mediation Contract) - The mediation contract is the agreement between you and us for the insurance mediation service that we provide to you in respect of your insurance requirements.

Once you have entered into the mediation contact with us, as a retail customer you are entitled to a period of reflection during which you may decide whether to proceed with the purchase of the mediation contract. The duration of this cancellation period is 14 days and commences from either. This may not apply if you policy is on a commercial basis.

The day of conclusion of the mediation contract, or the day on which you receive the full terms of the mediation contract detailing the full contractual terms, conditions and information for the contract, whichever is the later.

To cancel the mediation contract within the cooling off period, please write to us at the above address returning all the documents issued. If you do cancel this mediation contract within the cancellation period, you will be liable for the insurer’s time on risk charge and our £35 administration charge. If a charge has been made for setting up the policy this is non refundable. With the exclusion of any policy written on a minimum and deposit basis.

This mediation contract can be, cancelled at any time by either party in writing giving 5 days notice. If you wish to give notice of cancellation, please write to us. If we wish to cancel this mediation contract, we shall write to you at the last known address we have for you on our records. Please note that on cancellation of this contract outside of what is commonly known as the cooling off period (the first 14 days), we will retain 15% of the return premium given from your insurer, and any other charges we have made in relation to your policy.

Commission Withdrawal – We receive commission from the premium that you pay to us. We shall only withdraw commission after we have received the premium from you and in accordance with FSA Regulations and agreements we hold with Insurers. The amount of commission will be disclosed to you on request.

Premiums and Financial Aspects – In order to be able to offer you credit facilities, we are registered under the consumer credit act agreements we hold with Insurers or arrange credit with third party credit providers we may offer you credit via.

We normally accept payments by cash, guaranteed cheque or all the major credit/debit cards.

You may wish to spread your payments through Insurers instalment schemes, a credit scheme with a third party finance provider, or a facility, which we have arranged for you. We will give you full details of your payment options when we discuss your insurance in details.

We may keep certain documents, such a your insurance policy documents or certificate while we are waiting for full payment of premiums. In these circumstances, we will ensure that you receive full details of your insurance cover and we will provide you with any documents you are required to have by law.

Please note if you are paying your policy by instalments, in the event of a claim the balance under that agreement will become due and acceptance of these terms of business give us your authority to deduct this from any settlement amount that is resultant from the claim.

Risk Transfer – Premiums that we collect from you are held in an insurance broking bank account specifically used for this purpose of holding client premiums. By virtue of agreements we hold with Insurers, we collect premiums as agents for most of the Insurers. Therefore, once we have collected premiums from you, under the agreements we have with insurers, those premiums are treated as having been paid to the insurer. We will remit the premiums to Insurers, after the deduction of our commission and/or fees, we have collected in accordance with the terms of our agreement with our Insurers.

Client money segregation (Statutory trust) – Premiums that we collect from you will be segregated into and held in a client money bank account. The client money will be, held by us as trustee on your behalf. The client money bank account is set us a trust governed by FSA rules. This means that once the client money is segregated into the client money bank account, it falls into our legal ownership but remains in the beneficial ownership of customers whose premiums are deposited in the account. If we become insolvent, the terms of the trust dictate that customers will have a prior claim on the client money in the account according to their respective interest in the client money. The costs relating to the distribution of client money may have to be borne by trust.

Earning Interest on Insurance Broking Account – We hold premiums as disclosed above under FSA Regulations are required to advise you that we may earn interest from the money held in our insurance broking account. This interest is paid into our business account and used for the running of our business, by accepting these terms of business you are giving your consent for us to act in the manner described.

Customer Money Passed to Another Person – In accordance with FSA regulations, we have to inform you that in managing and/or arranging your insurance requirements, we may transfer money that you have paid to us in payment of an insurance premium to another insurance intermediary. By accepting these terms of business, you are giving your consent to us to act in the manner described.

Governing Law – This agreement shall be governed by, the laws of England and Wales and the parties agree herewith that any arsing out of it shall be subject to the (non-) exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts.

Other Taxes and Costs – Other taxes or costs, or both, may exist in relation to the products and services offered by us which are not paid through, nor imposed, by us.

Wholesale placement schemes where we earn reduced commission. On the placement of new business and renewals from time to time in order to get you the most competitive terms we may have to look at wholesale schemes that are not placed directly with an insurer. When this is the case we will earn a reduced amount of commission, in order to cover our costs when using these schemes we will make a charge in addition to any commission paid this will not exceed a maximum of 15% of the premium. The amount of any charge on top of the premium will always be disclosed to you prior to inception of any policy.

Wholesale placement schemes where we earn no commission. As explained above sometimes to get you the best deal we will use facilities that sometimes pay us no commission, in order for us to cover our costs of setting up and administrating these policies we will charge a fee up to a maximum of 25% of the premium, this charge will be disclosed to you prior to inception of the policy.

service charges when neither of the above apply:

• New Business - £25
• Mid-term Adjustments - £10
• Renewals - £10
• Lost Documents - £10
• Direct debit defaults - £25
• Bounced cheques - £25

Cancellation of policy – deduction of 15% from your Return premium to cover administration costs.