People’s Choice car insurance

People's Choice is a trading name of Hastings Insurance Services which is based in Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex.

Hastings Insurance Services is part of the Hastings Group, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange. 

People’s Choice is a car insurance intermediary, so it works with car insurance providers rather than providing its own insurance.  It is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority to sell insurance.

This means People’s Choice works with several insurance providers, sometimes called a panel, in order to check and compare car insurance quotes. 

People’s Choice is an intermediary so it can source cheaper quotes from a panel of insurance providers. 

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People's Choice cannot offer quotes to drivers with criminal convictions or those who have more than 5 accidents, claims, losses, motoring convictions or endorsements in the past 5 years. 

They also exclude cars that have been modified to enhance appearance or performance.

People’s Choice’s sister company Hastings Direct has donated £50,000 for local charities as part of a local Covid-19 Community Commitment Grant Scheme

Hastings Direct made a further £50,000 available to support local charities in Bexhill and Leicester, on top of the initial £50,000 previously announced.

Hastings donated nearly £50,000 to many local charities over the past weeks from their COVID-19 Community Commitment Grant scheme.

The scheme aims to help the most vulnerable in our communities via food hamper provisions and through a community grant fund for local charities that colleagues would like Hastings to support.  

In the Bexhill area, Hastings has been raising money for Dom’s Food Mission and in Leicester for Open Hands to support the work they both do for their local areas. 

Collectively, colleagues and other supporters have donated over £7,300 to the charities so far, with Hastings kicking off the fundraising by donating £2,500 to each charity.

Hastings has helped many local charities via the grant scheme, including St Michael’s Hospice, Sussex 4x4 Response, and Warming Up The Homeless in the Bexhill area and Menphys, Leicester Islamic Academy and LOROS Hospice in Leicester.

The Financial Ombudsman Service received 170 complaints about Hastings motor insurance, which runs the People’s Choice brand, in the first half of 2020. This was across all Hastings brands. Hastings had the seventh highest number of complaints. However, most Hastings policies are underwritten by its own insurer Advantage and the FOS received a further 243 complaints about Advantage. That makes a total of 413 complaints in six months, making it the third most complained about car insurer this year.

Hastings (including Advantage) received 8.2% of the 5,029 total complaints about car insurance. Hastings has 7.8% market share when based on gross written premium (GWP), which suggests it gets more complaints than expected for its size. But Hasting sells low-cost insurance to standard drivers in normal cars, and does not insure expensive, high-risk drivers in luxury cars. This means Hastings has more customers for the same GWP as some other insurers.

Realistically Hasting’s complaints levels are in line with other large insurers. To put complaints in context, 67 firms had 10 or more complaints each and those totalled 4,550 complaints. Nearly 200 firms had fewer than 10 each, sharing just 479 complaints between them.