It also features (did we mention this?) a round-table discussion involving Bankstone’s own Dickon Tysoe.

Edited highlights follow:

David Bonehill (Ecclesiastical): “It’s not us that define good or bad [claims] service.”

Chris Murray (Halliwells): “If you go bargain basement, you’ve got to be a bit wary.”

DB: “Service from the composites may not be so good.”

Stephen Walker (Provident): “Often a broker only gets involved when things start to go wrong.”

DB: “It’s an interesting point.”

Chris Hall (Questgates): “They are not going to send someone out on a claim.”

DB (again): “Take insurance exams.”

SW: “If I look at our claims, 90-95% will go down a particular process.”

DB: “You won’t get empathy for the customer.”

Owen Gorman (Delta Claims): “It’s about allowing people in the claims environment to do what they need to do.”

Dickon Tysoe (finally someone who’ll talk some sense): “I have experience of working in a call centre environment.”

CH: “It’s interesting.”

DB: “But do you think by doing that you create different claims handling philosophies?”

CM: “Could you include a caveat, if you want to go off-piste, as it were?”

DT: “I’m also wondering.”

CM: “I can give you a good example of that.”

CH: “Motor is the only sector where you can do that.”

Chris Barnett (Heath Lambert): “That’s an area where complaints can occur.”

DB: “There are different models for brokers as well.”

CB: “I work in corporate commercial now.”

DT: “Is it not the broker’s responsibility to make sure that business is placed in the right market that can deliver the value-added stuff when claims arise?”

DB: “Oh yes, all the time.”

CH: “Nowadays people have cars, mobile phones, Blackberries, web-based IT systems.”

DB: “You could approach the claim blindly.”

To read the full text of this fascinating discussion click here.

Are you a biker? Then see below to find out which kind you are! If not, keep reading anyway for the sheer joy of ploughing through a rancid old load of neologistical jargon-mongery.

Performance disciples (PDs)
Worshiping at the altar of speed, these loons ride flat out all year, taking no prisoners along the way.

Performance hobbyists (PHs)
For these summer-only hedonists, TRL claim, “riding is all about individual experiences and sensations.”

Riding disciples (RDs)
Sworn devotees of the bike messiah, these guys live to ride, bond strongly with other bikers, and, allegedly, with their bikes.

Riding hobbyists (RHs)
Mild mannered “weekend warriors,” usually bearded and bulbous in their leathers, typically into the social aspect.

Car rejecters (CRs)
Don’t like bikes much, but like traffic jams still less – can sometimes turn out to be ladies when they remove their helmets.

Car aspirants (CAs)
Would rather have a proper motor, but can’t afford one yet.

Look-at-me enthusiasts (LAMEs)
These young, or mentally retarded, bikers are enthusiastic about being looked at, obviously, making up in recklessness what they lack in having the faintest clue what they are doing.

RDs and RHs are the least likely to have accidents. PDs crash often – but then they ride a lot further. CAs and LAMEs are most likely to be involved in accidents – basically because they don’t know what they are doing. CRs and PHs are also a bit suspect on the riding skills, but since they ride less far, they crash less often.

Each type has its own distinctive attitude to risk. PDs adopt what TRL call “precautionary fatalism,” fending off death with a combination of skill and “armour.” PHs like the idea of danger, but ride cautiously in practice. RDs are like PDs, only cautiouser.

RHs “tend to avoid potentially risky situations altogether,” usually by leaving their bikes at home, presumably. CRs are hating every minute of this, and are acutely aware of risk. CAs tend not to take the whole thing too seriously, because they’ll be buying a car soon. LAMEs deliberately court danger, accepting that biking is risky, but thinking they’re somehow immune.

Disturbingly, TRL reckon that one in four UK bikers is a LAME. Twice as likely to have an accident as RDs, LAMEs will come a cropper once every 29,000 miles. According to a TRL spokesperson, LAMEs “are the group least likely to hesitate about riding in jeans and a T-shirt.”

Typically males under 25, LAMEs “cite acceleration, power and sound as the most important factors when choosing a bike,” and choose protective gear based on looks above performance.

This country needs more young men with that kind of spirit!

According to a new survey by satnavs-to-lady-bikes outlet Halfords, nearly a third of drivers claim to read texts while driving. Almost one in five say they send texts at the wheel. One in 20 looks at Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites. But few will admit to posting social media status updates or emailing.

Given survey respondents’ habitual self-serving economy with the veracité, the true figures are probably higher. Only a third admitted to using their mobiles while driving, but more than half were happy to dob-in fellow motorists, claiming that they had ‘been a passenger in a car when the driver has made or received a phone call.’

Never fear, though, Halfords have an answer (or the answer, they claim) to all this irresponsible in-car digitation:

”It seems there is still some way to go to ensure drivers use mobile phones legally and drive with due care and attention,” their spokesperson said. “The only way to do this is by installing a hands-free device in your car.”

Hands-free devices sound like a great idea – but where can we get one? Simple: just check www.halfords.co.ck for details of your nearest store. Maybe pull over first though, eh?

New plans from the DfT will require mobi-riders to take a driving test and purchase compulsory motor insurance, like the rest of us.

They could also face criminal persecution for dangerous driving if they drive dangerously.

In fact, The Daily Telegraph this week claimed, causing injury “by ‘wanton and furious driving’ with a mobility scooter could incur a two-year prison sentence with hard labour under an 1861 law.”

The new plans come in response to mounting alarm over the threat posed by an army of 330,000 mobility scooters and electric wheelchairs running amok across the UK.

Police are currently powerless to act unless they can catch mobi-riders over the drink-drive limit or using a hand-held device while ‘driving.’

Invalid carriages (as these fiendish contraptions are officially known) are supposed to travel no faster than 4mph on the pavement or 8mph on the road.

But with some machines tuned up to reach speeds of 40mph or more, the law is widely flouted.

Make no mistake: these people are a menace. They don’t have licenses, so they can’t be disqualified. They don’t have insurance, so their victims have no redress.

Implicated in countless low-speed hit and runs, in routine disregard for the safety of other road and pavement users, and even in drug-running, it’s time these people were taught a lesson.

In a feat of statistical analysis that will surely rock the motor insurance sector to its foundations, Virgin Monkey have established that, whilst ten year old cars account for just 6 per cent of claims, five-year olds (cars, remember, not drivers) are implicated in more than 9 per cent of claims.

In fact, the study clearly showed that people with older cars make more claims than people with newer cars.

“This will take some time to digest,” commented someone who’d just eaten a large meal.

Anxious not to spark panic, however, Virgin Money was quick to calm the fears of older car owners, or rather the owners of older cars.

“This is not to say that cars five years old are the most dangerous, but that they are more likely to be involved in an incident that leads to a claim being made,” clarified virgin spokesman Grant Blather.

He explained that motor claims could result from “traffic accident, breakdown or theft.”

Here it was that your correspondent stumbled across a most unusual and exciting literary invitation. GEM is soliciting submissions to a poetry competition, with potholes as its theme. Yes really! We know!

Doubtless, many Bankstone News readers will be eager to submit their own contributions. But to set the ball rolling, as they say, Bankstone News has penned a brief verse of its own:

I was driving along in my truck
When I had some quite awful bad luck
Saw the pothole too late
Swerved and crashed through a gate
Jumped out, kicked the wheel, and said how annoying!

Enter now by clicking here.

That’s according to “the UK’s leading driving based road safety association with around 60,000 members” GEM* (formerly known as the Guild of Experienced Motorists, formerly known as the Company of Veteran Motorists).

GEM, some of whose members are really not that old these days, reckon that half of all UK drivers have had a crash or near miss while swerving to avoid a pothole. While another half (the half who didn’t swerve?) have had their cars damaged by potholes.

Only five percent, however, they note tantalizingly, have made a claim for compensation against the relevant local authority. And whilst they’re quick enough to accuse local councils of not doing enough to fix them, 78% of motorists never bother reporting their location. The hypocrisy of it!

“Often motorists will not spot a pothole until it is too late,” a GEM person said, and then “they either swerve out of the way, which could result in a crash, or cause damage to their car.”

One solution might be to consult the interactive pothole map at www.potholes.co.uk/potholes before you set out on a car journey. Alternatively, you could download the new iPot iPhone app which rants like a demented co-pilot, advising when a hole is coming up, how deep, how wide, and how crumbly round the edges it is, and what evasive action you must take to avoid it.

*GEM Motoring Assist’s principal aims are “to improve safety for all road users through the sponsorship and initiation of accident prevention measures throughout the UK and to provide motoring and safety information to its own members, principally through its magazine “Good Motoring.” And possibly to make a couple of quid flogging breakdown cover.

Even those who do understand the term don’t seem to take it too seriously. 35% of drivers saw fronting as a “loophole” in the law and 10% thought it a legitimate way of obtaining cheaper motor insurance

Aviva’s motoring strategist, Nigel Bartram, comments: “Well meaning parents may consider fronting an insurance policy to try and save money, but this is false economy as those that try to cheat the system by declaring false information will find that their insurance is invalid when they actually need to make a claim on their policy.”

*For the sake of clarity, the Dictionary of Urban Slang tells us that fronting – or frontin’ – indicates the misrepresentation of a fact or situation, as in: When my ****-*** ******** is ****** and ****** ****** like she gon ****** **** ****** ***** but she jus’ frontin’. I ****** ******* *******, hell yeah.

According to biker’s bible MCN, a badly disconcerted PM is demanding answers PDQ as to why there’s apparently been a huge a huge drop in the number of people taking the motorcycle test since the format changed last year.

The row began when Tory MP Anne Main’s husband Andy, a “life-long biker,” read in MCN that 50,000 fewer people took the test in the first eight months of its new incarnation. Alarm bells ringing, he told Ms Main at once. “My wife doesn’t sit around” he noted.

No indeed. At this week’s PMQs, the St Albans MP took Brozza firmly to task. “Since 2008 and the introduction of new rules on motorcycling and tests, the number of people taking the test has declined by 62%,” she noted, “and the number of people passing the test has declined by 58 per cent.

“The motorbiking industry,” she explained, “is extremely important in the UK. What will the Prime Minister do to rectify what is obviously a very poor system?”

The beleaguered Brown fought back gamely with: “I shall take the figures that the honourable Lady has given me and ask the Transport Minister to look into that very matter. It is important that we have a strong motorcycling industry in this country, and it is important that her question about the specifics of the tests be answered.”

The riding of motorcycles is not expected to become compulsory, however, during the life of the current Parliament.