If you have had this problem before with this insurer, if I were you I would a) change insurers or b) make all your changes during insurer's office hours by phone, requesting e-mail confirmation.

You will have a hard time defending this charge in court. The burden rests with you to show you were insured at the relevant time and quite simply you cannot.. The time issue is not really a starter. If you opt for a court hearing you will be served with the evidence they intend to use to convict you and it will almost certainly contain the officer's statement which will detail the time.

The peril of taking the matter to court is that even if you plead guilty (having seen the officer's statement) you will be sentenced in accordance with the sentencing guidelines. These suggest a starting point of a fine of one week's net income. But you will also pay a surcharge of 10% of the fine (Minimum £32) and £85 costs. So even a weekly income of just £185pw will see you paying more than £300. You may be able to persuade the court to impose a lower fine because of the circumstances where you genuinely believed you were insured but you cannot rely on it. In any case, six points is the minimum that can be imposed. Defending the matter but being convicted at trial will see a fine of 150% of weekly income but increased costs of £620.

My own view is that unless you can secure positive evidence from the insurers that you were insured (and from what you say that is unlikely) accepting the Fixed Penalty is the best for damage limitation. A very expensive lesson learned, unfortunately.

I think I'm just going to chalk it up as an expensive lesson. I've spoken to 2-3 insurers with all my details etc and so far my insurance will be roughly the same with the points etc. One was actually cheaper. Will most likely change my insurer as I've had nothing but issues with this one, between this, the last incident and a few others at the start they're becoming a costly insurance company. Anyways, I appreciate your advice folks and thanks for all the replies.

Edited by oldrocker on 29/02/2020 at 18:53

Presumably the OP was caught out by ANPR which flagged the car up as 'uninsured'? Unfortunately, ANPR is quite good at catching deliberate miscreants but also catches out the 'innocents' in a situation like this.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and the wise thing to do would have been to phone the ins co the following morning before driving the car. But in all honesty, how many would have done that?

It also shows what a minefield buying a car privately can be like today with databases not always updating in real time. Many update overnight and anything not loaded to the databse before whatever cut off time it has (could be as early as 6pm), may well not update until the next run the following evening. Then the company's database has to update MID so you can easily be looking at a few days. Meanwhile, ANPR flags up 'uninsured' vehicles during this operational gap and pedantic police writes you a ticket.

And none of this takes into consideration using your credit card details to pay tax and insurance over what is likely to be a public access wifi connection.