Emma Wall (Your Money, January 30th) attributes rising motor premiums to fraudulent claims and uninsured drivers. I suggest that the third reason is the increasing involvement of accident management companies. An insured driver pulled out of a parking space in London into the side of my car, driven by my husband, a named driver. No one was injured. He admitted responsibility, gave me all the relevant details and indicated he might like to settle privately. I assumed he or his insurance would settle repair that might cost £400 to £800. At this point of was unaware of even the existence of accident management companies. Before I had even informed by insurance broker, my husband I started receiving letters and calls from accident management companies (AMCs), at least five in all, some of whom were solicitors, implying strongly that they had been “appointed to manage this incident”. We responded to one by filling in forms as requested before we began to suspect not all was as it seemed. As it appeared that these AMCs had not been appointed by either party but were ‘accident chasing’, we took the advice of our broker who advised us to work with its AMC. This AMC arranged for my car to go in for an estimate (taking all of 10 minutes I imagine) and then for the repair some ten days later. For this whole period – nine days of which my perfectly driveable car sat in the repair shop waiting for authorisation of the repair – the AMC insisted that I had a replacement hire car. To cut a long story short the cost of repair of my car rose steadily as the hire car costs were added, then legal costs. Of course no one tells us exactly what is going on except to ask us to authorise use of our legal cover – but I suspect the cost of what amounted to a modest bump is soaring towards £5,000 or more than five times what was necessary. AMCs are manufacturing the situations from which they make money – their interests are diametrically opposite to those of efficient, low-cost claim settlement, and push up the cost of motor insurance. I think it is a scandal and a rip-off and would welcome the Telegraph personal finance and motoring sections lifting the lid.