Young person’s car insurance provider Young Marmalade gets road safety award
25 November 2009 / by Rachael Stiles
Young Marmalade, the young person’s car insurance/car purchase scheme provider, has received an international award for road safety.
At the Road Safety GB Conference in Cambridge this month, Young Marmalade was awarded the Prince Michael International Road Safety Award, in recognition of its work towards making Britain’s roads safer.
The awards, which have been going since 1987, are organised and managed by RoadSafe. Reportedly, it is unusual for a private company such as Young Marmalade to win the award over a public service or non-profit organisation, but it won because of its contribution to road safety by requiring young drivers to take additional training after they have passed their test.
In return for meeting certain safety standards on the road, young drivers are rewarded with cheaper car insurance premiums by Young Marmalade car insurance, combined with selling them a new or nearly new car.
Dubbed by Top Gear’s Richard Hammond as a “clever idea”, Young Marmalade requires its customers to have taken the Pass Plus test or equivalent, or to have built up at least 12 months of no claims. This allows young or new drivers to get cheaper car insurance than other providers of young drivers’ car insurance offer.
The majority of large providers in the car insurance industry see car insurance for young drivers as “too much like hard work” and “unprofitable”, Young Marmalade said in a statement, “which has resulted in it being largely ignored or in fact abandoned.”
Adrian Walsh, director of RoadSafe, who presented the award to Young Marmalade, commented: “High insurance premiums are often a barrier to young drivers being able to drive modern safe cars; this excellent scheme overcomes this and reduces their risk even further with additional supervised training after the test.”
Young Marmalade co-founder Nigel Lacy, added: “A 17 year old in an urban area can spend £300 per month insuring a cheap ‘old banger’. The insurance is pure cost and the car is worth very little. They can be shown photos of accident victims, but at the end of the day they just see money going out with nothing to show for it. The young driver almost drives as if they want to get some value out of the insurance.”
Young Marmalade offers a wide range of cars for purchase, and manages the risks by limiting the size of the car engine, and selling a newer car (under 18 months old) with modern controls and safety systems and ensuring that all drivers are trained to be safe on the road.
Young drivers taking up Young Marmalade’s scheme are three times less likely to be involved in a crash, according to research. And, it found that combining the car and insurance in a package could cost a young driver less for the car and insurance than traditional insurance alone.
Crispin Moger, managing director of Young Marmalade, said: “We saw how the insurance industry was penalising young drivers and we gathered the support of car manufacturers, to provide a safer solution for this vulnerable sector of the driving community”.
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