askMID.com – the roadside insurance check on your smartphone

A new service recently launched by the Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB) will help millions of people unlucky enough to be involved in a road traffic accident: using your smartphone you can now check another vehicle’s insurance details at the roadside.

The service will not only help remove some of the stress involved in taking down important insurance details at the scene, it will also let you know immediately if any of the other motorists involved are not insured.

Using your smartphone, you simply visit askMID.com where you’ll then be asked to enter:

• Your email address
• Your vehicle’s registration number
• The third party vehicle’s registration number

And for a fee of £4, you’ll then receive confirmation of insurer and contact details both on screen, as well as by email.

If any of the details given to you by the third party at the scene don’t match those in the MIB database, or the third party isn’t insured, you can inform the police or your insurers straight away.

The MIB still recommend that you note down all the addresses and contact details from all involved parties including witnesses, plus the vehicle registrations and insurance details; they suggest you may also want to take photographs of any damage.

Uninsured Losses

You may be thinking that people surely aren’t foolish enough to drive without insurance. Not so – whilst the number of uninsured drivers caught has decreased by 34% since 2011, still nearly half a million UK motorists have received penalty points for driving without insurance over the past three years. Uninsured driving remains a UK-wide problem.

And if that statistic isn’t enough, it is estimated that uninsured and untraced drivers kill 130 people and injure 26,500 every year. Research shows that uninsured drivers are also five times more likely to be involved in road collisions, and will fail to comply with other road traffic requirements.

Our advice is to bookmark the MIB website in your smartphone’s browser, and should the unthinkable happen, be sure to log on to askMID.com and make use of this invaluable service.

[Data from The Churchill report and the Motor Insurers Bureau.]