A haulage company has reduced its annual insurance bill by more than £25,000 since installing its fleet with Smart Witness incident cameras.
Brian Yeardley Continental, based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, owns 43 trucks and eight company cars which all now carry the recording device. Managing Director Kevin Hopper decided to install the cameras after becoming increasingly concerned about 'cash for crash' scams in which fraudsters deliberately cause accidents to submit damage and bogus injury clams. He was also concerned about conflicting accident reports and since spending just £7,000 on the cameras in May, his insurance bill has reduced from £135,000 to around £110,000.
Brian said, "I wish I could have installed Smart Witness 20 years ago. Year on year our insurance bill has gone up and up but now it has finally gone down. I would have been happy if the bill had gone down by £5,000 but I never expected it would reduce by £25,900.”
"Our accident rate has gone down by about 50 per cent from 15 incidents last year to seven so far this year. Each accident cost us at least £1300 in excess, so the cameras have saved us a lot of money.”
The cameras have also deterred immigrants from targeting the fleet in Calais to travel illegally to the UK. Stickers warning of the cameras have been fitted to the rear doors of the vehicles and no incidents of stowaways or theft from vehicles have been reported since.
Picture: The Smart Witness incident camera.