Where do you keep your bike?

Where you keep the bike at night is a significant factor when calculating your insurance risk. In your garage or shed is obviously good. In the street is not good. You can tell lies if you want, but in the event of a theft claim, an assessor might well come around and talk to neighbours or the local police/community service officers and ask where the bike was generally parked. That assessor might also quickly visit your home following a claim and check the garage. If it's full of furniture, he'll want to know why.

Alarms are a sound idea (no pun intended). CCTV helps, in theory. But we’ve frequently received insurance quotes in which our CCTV and alarm systems haven’t actually made much (if any) difference, financially speaking. You really can’t figure it out. A computer, remember, doesn’t really know what an alarm or security camera is and will simply react to programming that’s often at variance with reality.

However, the built-in security system on your bike usually impresses all insurers. And if you mention "Thatcham", that can occasionally save you a couple of bob.

Sometimes, however, it seems that most of these security questions are really designed simply to keep you wrong-footed. It's as if all the insurer really wants to know is where you live, your age, and how many years no-claims bonus you've accumulated. And sometimes here at Sump we wonder if there isn't a little device on the broker's telephone line that listens to our voice patterns and works out just how much we're likely to pay.

But more realistically, there probably is some kind of algorithm at work, or play. But it's not fixed. Like the weather, it changes.

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