Immobilisers and insurance in Buckingham — what your insurer wants to see

Almost every Buckingham driver asks the same question first, which is whether fitting an immobiliser will bring the premium down. It is the less useful of the two questions worth asking. The more useful one is whether your policy already requires you to have one, and that is the one nobody checks until it is too late to matter.

On the premium, be realistic about it. Some insurers will reduce a quote for a professionally fitted and independently certified immobiliser, and plenty will not move at all. Where it makes a consistent difference is on the vehicles underwriters are already nervous about — higher-value cars, models with a known theft problem, and anything that lives outside on a rural property rather than in a garage. If none of that describes your car, treat any reduction as a bonus rather than the reason for doing it.

The requirement question deserves ten minutes of an evening. On higher-value vehicles a growing number of underwriters now make cover conditional on approved security being fitted and in use. That condition is not in the summary that arrives by email when you renew. It sits in the endorsements, which is the section almost everybody scrolls past, and a policy that says an approved immobiliser must be fitted is a policy that can decline a theft claim when one is not.

So read the endorsements rather than the schedule, and look for the word approved and for any category named alongside it. If you find something and cannot tell what satisfies it, send us the wording. We will tell you what meets it — including the cases where what is already on the car is sufficient and you do not need us at all.

What TASSA provides is proof. It is the industry register for vehicle security installers, and a TASSA-logged installation is recorded against the vehicle identification number by an accredited fitter whose identity has been verified. That is the difference between telling an insurer you had something fitted and being able to demonstrate it. A unit bought from a marketplace and wired in by whoever quoted least may work perfectly well and still count for nothing at claim stage, because no independent record exists that it was ever there.

Every installation we carry out in Buckingham is TASSA-certified on the day and you keep the certificate. It is not an upgrade and it is not charged separately — it is the reason for using a registered installer instead of a man with a van and a box of parts.

Then do the part people skip, which is telling them. Security nobody knows about cannot reduce a premium, cannot be taken into account at renewal, and is not evidence of anything if you only mention it after a claim has been made. It takes one call or one message through the app with the certificate to hand. Do it the same week the system goes in, and mention it again at renewal, because a note made in year one does not always follow the policy forward.

If you would like to know where your policy actually stands before spending anything, send us the wording and the registration. The answer costs nothing either way, and every install we do across Buckingham and the MK18 villages is TASSA-certified on the day.