car insurance fronting is a subject which every so often gets dragged into the spotlight.

To clarify, a fraud called “fronting” occurs when a young person has a car in their own name, but the insurer is falsely told that someone else other than the main driver of the motor insurance policy is driving the vehicle most of the time. The most common example of this is where parents are fronting policies for their children in an attempt to lower the cost of car insurance premiums.

Recent research delivers evidence that as many as one in five young drivers are complicit in what’s known as insurance fronting. As a consequence of this car insurance firms are rejecting a thousand claims a year as some parents and children lie to save money.

Fronting has been made illegal because it presents a much higher risk for the insurers than what they have quoted you for. To them, the main driver should be the one using the car most of the time and any additional drivers should be driving occasionally. It is on this basis and the fact that an experienced driver is less likely to be involved in an accident than a young driver that the premiums are considerably cheaper.

The insurance industry itself will not reveal any figures on how many claims it is turning down, but the Financial Ombudsman Service says it is dealing with between 100 and 200 fronting disputes each year, and that indicates that firms will be dealing with around 1000 such cases annually.