Recently, I helped my lady-pensioner cousin with a claim on her car insurance. She had been a customer for several years with Co-op Insurance Services (CIS), based in Manchester. She flew back from holiday in July 2010 to find that her car had been stolen from her driveway at home (though locked and with the keys inside her burglar-alarmed house). The car was found later, trashed and a write-off. It seems some kids may have done it for fun. Nobody has ever been prosecuted.

My cousin made a claim on CIS - and at first their inspector offered her £3000 in settlement. CIS then withdrew this, via their Loss Adjuster, a multi-national firm called Cunningham & Lindsay (C&L). This firm instanced the “facts” among others, that: the wrecked car had one possibly illegal tyre; there was no forcing damage to the car doorlock; my cousin at the time of renewal had not notified a fixed-penalty fine of £60 for inadvertently going through a red light, plus other irrelevant stuff. All done with photos and an aggressive letter style. Bluster, not substance.

We did not accept this - and neither did the Financial Services Ombudsman, who ruled in our favour, making CIS with the two years’ interest pay my cousin an eventual £3,891. But with truly professional tactics by C&L, the process took seven months, with CIS and their Loss Adjusters wriggling every inch, every second and every step of the way.

The lessons I would draw from this for every motorist out there are these: your insurance company, while loving your premium payment, may not be so keen on paying out on claims; they and their advisors may well reach for any pretext, however far-fetched, to deny your legitimate claim; they may well retain cynical, professional claim-deniers to conjure up a case against you - and these people are called ‘Loss Adjusters’, but whose loss are they adjusting? Yours.