Moneyadviceforu

With Santa and his helpers busy preparing for his annual sleigh ride, online car insurance specialist elephant.co.uk is hoping he doesn’t call for a quote.

His high mileage and high speed driving coupled with his fondness of an alcoholic tipple or two at Christmas would make him a high risk and his premium astronomical.

elephant.co.uk MD, Brian Martin said: “Santa’s mileage is huge, as the crow flies it’s about 64,000 miles around the world, but one of our elephant.co.uk policyholders comes close driving a whopping 60,000 miles. Of course, he does this over a year not in one night like Santa.

“However, Santa has a few hundred years on our oldest policyholder who’s 87 years old, and with a long driving history and no theft or accident claims, I imagine he has a few years no-claims bonus under his belt.”

To get around the world in one night, Santa would need to travel at an average speed of 2,700 mph - and that’s without any stops! Surely a speeding fine is inevitable sooner or later? At that speed, a ban would also be unavoidable. Santa might argue in court that his vehicle is essential to his job and a ban would bring heartache to millions of children all over the world.

Brian continued: “The fastest car we insure is the Lamborghini Murcielago but our underwriters would have a hard time working out an insurance group for Santa’s sleigh. They’re used to rating vehicles by the horsepower of their engines, but where does a sleigh with twelve reindeer power fit in?”

Santa’s tendency to enjoy an alcoholic tipple during his high-speed journey around the world would be another risk to consider when insuring his sleigh. Just think how many kids leave Santa a mince pie and a glass of brandy before they go to bed on Christmas Eve, and never wanting to disappoint, he never leaves any.

An area which was one of the first to model itself as a “safety town” is the most dangerous in the country for accidents, it was revealed.

Slough in Berkshire, which is ringed by traffic lights and speed cameras, topped a most-accident table compiled by Endsleigh Insurance Services.

The Berkshire town had an accident rate 35.7% above the national average in 2007, Endsleigh said.

Slough’s safety promotions go back to the 1960s when it introduced lights timed to be on green so long as drivers stuck to the speed limit. In recent years, the number of lights encircling the town and its industrial estate have grown.

After Slough, Ilford in east London had the most accidents (35.5% above the national average), with Birmingham third (32.9% above).

The most accident-free town or city was Belfast (47.0% below the national average), with Swansea (29.9% below) in second place and Aberdeen (20.6% below) third.

Hull was the place with the most vehicle thefts in 2007, being 143.9% above the national average. Second was Nottingham (82.9% above the national average), with Leeds third (77.8% above).

Endsleigh said that overall, it had seen a 13% fall in motor theft claims across the UK in the last three years.

Swindon had 42.9% fewer cases of theft than the national average, with Norwich (42.3% below the average) and Dundee (38.9% below) also comparatively crime-free areas.

Slough was 35.7% above the national accident average, with Ilford in east London second (35.5% above) and Birmingham third (32.9% above).

A man accused of faking his own death in an insurance scam was ordered by a court yesterday to remain in custody on charges of fraud and acquiring a passport under a false name.John Darwin, 57 - who turned up at a London police station on December 1, years after being declared dead from a 2002 canoe accident - was ordered by Hartlepool Magistrates’ Court to be held in jail until Friday, when he will appear again via video link.

Dressed in a maroon sweat shirt and red track trousers, Darwin, a former prison officer, appeared dishevelled and confused. He spoke twice during the four-minute hearing, responding “That’s correct” when the court read him his full name and saying his date of birth.

Darwin did not enter a plea on the two charges he faces: Dishonestly obtaining an insurance claim of £25,000 (now worth approximately $50,000, BD18,900) in May 2003 by falsely claiming he had been killed, and obtaining a passport under a false name in October 2003.

Darwin’s wife, Anne, 55, was arrested on suspicion of fraud after her flight from Atlanta, Georgia, touched down at Manchester’s airport on Sunday. She had been living in Panama in recent months, but left the Central American country Wednesday.

On Sunday, Mrs Darwin was transferred to Cleveland, 400km north of London, where the Hartlepool court is located.

For a few hours yesterday morning, the Darwins were in same Hartlepool compound. Mrs Darwin was being questioned by detectives about how her husband allegedly hid himself for five years, whether the couple maintained contact after his reported death, and how they apparently came to be photographed together in Panama.

Millions of Britons are trapped in a cycle of debt, using their credit cards to fund Christmas purchases before they have even repaid last year’s spending, a survey claimed today.

Around one in 10 consumers - the equivalent of 4.4 million people - admit they are still repaying debt they ran up last December.

At the same time, 9% of people said it took them five months to clear their festive credit card bill, according to financial website

Chief executive, Sean Gardner, said: “Borrowing money is fine as long as you have a repayment plan.

“Unfortunately it appears millions of us do not. And with lenders getting tough, that is not a good position to be in. If you’ve not cleared the debts of Christmas past it is time to face up to the future.”

The figures are supported by ones from the Association of Business Recovery Professionals which found that one in 10 people will go further into debt in order to cover the cost of Christmas.

People planning to use credit for their festive expenses will borrow an average of £660 each, most of which will be put on credit cards, although some will be funded via overdrafts.

More than a quarter of these people plan to borrow money from friends and family members, while one in five will take out an additional loan.

Nick O’Reilly, vice-president of the association, said: “We are seeing record levels of insolvency in the UK and this is undoubtedly the result of people over-extending themselves.

“While it is tempting to spend more than you can afford, people should remember that the debt can last for years, not just for Christmas.”

A U.K. house-price drop of 10 percent next year may be no “bad thing” because it would help poorer Britons afford a home, Morgan Stanley economist David Miles said.“There’s a gain for people about to trade up or first-time buyers, and that offsets the loss when house prices are falling,” Miles, who advised the Treasury on the British property market, said in London yesterday. “

On balance, it’s almost certainly redistributive to people who are younger and less well off.”

Miles said investors’ bets show they forecast house prices will decline by as much as a tenth in 2008, ending a decade-long boom in which values tripled.

The Bank of England cut the benchmark interest rate last week to preempt the outlook for slower growth after the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market pushed up borrowing costs worldwide.

“For the majority of parts of the U.K., house prices are falling mildly on average,” Miles told a seminar organized by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a research group whose clients include the Treasury and the central bank. “That is not a bad thing.”

Britons are living with their parents for longer than they used to as gains in house prices make it less affordable for them to buy their own place, a government report said in April.

Mortgage interest payments for first-time buyers, as a percentage of income, rose to 20.6 percent in October, the highest since 1971, data from the Council for Mortgage Lenders showed yesterday.

Britain’s mortgage lenders face a £30 billion funding shortfall next year if the Bank of England does not step in to ease the credit squeeze, the industry’s lobby group said yesterday.

As much as a third of the £90 billion required to finance the demand for mortgage loans expected next year will need to come from money markets that effectively have been closed since August, the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) said.

But as the CML pleaded with the Bank to intervene to prevent a severe contraction in the availability of mortgages, banks were told to get their own house in order by the City’s regulator.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) said that lending conditions could get worse and that lenders should forgo profits to protect themselves against a collapse in liquidity of the sort that crippled Northern Rock.

The stark warnings, presented yesterday at the CML’s annual conference in London, come at a time of deepening gloom over Britain’s mortgage market.

New loans for house purchase are down by 31 per cent over the past year and all big surveys have shown house prices falling in recent months.

A credit card provider has denied it is introducing a charge “by stealth”.Nat West credit card holders who opted to join its new rewards scheme are now being billed £3 a month, unless they spend £1000 a month on the card.

Some customers claim the bank gave inadequate warning and is introducing the charge at Christmas when people may not notice.

Nat West says full details were in the written terms people got before registering to join last summer.

Scheme replaced Airmiles

RBS/Nat West group is the second largest UK credit card provider and introduced the Your Points reward scheme last June.

It replaced Airmiles, with Nat West claiming Your Points would be more flexible to customers’ needs.

Your Points allows points accumulated each time a purchase in made using the card, to be exchanged for budget airline flights and holidays.

Cardholders were encouraged to phone up and register to join, but now some lower spending people have complained to BBC’s Money Box, that there was no warning about the charge over the telephone at registration time, and say they feel disappointed and misled.

They have just received leaflets telling them that from 1 December, people who do not spent £1000 a month on their card, will see a £3 a month charge automatically added to their card bill.

That Britain is slipping into a personal debt crisis has been well documented for a number of years now.

The UK’s burgeoning levels of personal debt have, for a long time, far outweighed that of our European neighbours.  Indeed, figures released last year revealed that the average consumer in this county is £3,008 in debt compared to an average figure of £1,558 across the rest of Western Europe.

Alarmingly the UK is now responsible for a third of all unsecured debt in Western Europe. 

It’s a precarious state of affairs borne out by the current figures for personal debt in the UK: The total figure for personal debt in Britain in June 2007 was £1,355bn with the growth rate increasing to 10.1% for the previous 12 months; it would appear that this is not an issue that shows any sign of slowing down.

Including mortgages the average household debt for the UK is £56,000, excluding mortgages the figure is £8,856 and if based on households with some form of unsecured loan the average figure is £20,600.

Every four minutes this country’s personal debt is rising by a million pounds.