If your business runs more than one van, you should consider a fleet van insurance policy rather than a series of separate insurance arrangements for each vehicle. A commercial contract of this nature could provide welcome flexibility as well as proving to be the cheaper option.
Fleet in favour?
If you have a number of vans, it’s likely that you’ve assembled your fleet over a number of months or years. You might have started out with just the one – with its own insurance policy – and then added another to cope with increased workload. This too might have its own cover as you would have been looking to insure at a different time to your first vehicle’s renewal date.
The same might have happened with subsequent additions to the fleet, leaving you with a clutch of policies and a range of renewal dates. It’s easy to see how a single fleet policy with one renewal date could be easier to administer.
Insuring all your vehicles under one provider’s fleet van insurance policy might also work out cheaper – you would effectively be bulk-buying from a single supplier, which should be rewarded with a discount on the premium.
A fleet van insurance policy would also give you the opportunity to insure all of your drivers to take the wheel of any of your vans. This would boost flexibility and productivity and remove the need for any individual to have to wait for a particular van to come back to base before he or she could go out on a job.
Types of fleet van insurance cover
As with car insurance, there are different levels of fleet van insurance cover available. If you need a cheap policy – one that only covers any liabilities you might incur to others and provides no cover for you, your driver or your vehicle – then you could get ‘third party only’ protection.
‘Third party fire and theft’ insurance covers your potential liabilities and would reimburse you if your van were stolen or destroyed or damaged by fire. This would cost more than the most basic form of cover.
The highest level of fleet van insurance cover available is fully comprehensive. As well as the protection described above, it allows you to claim for any damage or injury sustained by yourself. As you might expect, this is the most expensive form of cover.
Variations on a theme
It’s worth noting that not all policies with the same levels of cover are identical. Some may offer additional extras such as van breakdown cover, windscreen protection and a legal expenses benefit. In some cases these may be optional, meaning you can strip them out to lower the premium. In others they may be included in the price.
It is your call whether to take such optional extras. It is easy to see why breakdown cover might be important, especially if your business is heavily reliant on your vans and couldn’t function without them.
The same applies to legal expenses cover – this would pick up your costs if you found yourself embroiled in a legal dispute.
Shop online for cheap fleet van insurance
Whatever level of cover you require, you can find cheap fleet van insurance policies by using the MoneySupermarket fleet van insurance comparison service to compare deals through leading specialist commercial insurers.