Ouch - £20ks worth of bikes pinched from a garage in my town

[Cubist]

i simply find it strange that a 12 year old child has been trusted with such an expensive piece of kit. nobody is sniping.

Perhaps "sniping " was a poor choice of words.

I suppose it's all about what folk want to spend their money on. I always find it funny on here when someone asks "what hardtail should I get with my budget of £1,500 and someone always pipes up with "Spend £300 on a Rockrider and spend the change on lentils."

My lad is a mad keen MTB rider. For his 13th birthday I built him a Ragley that cost him £1500 in parts alone. That was using discounted parts. Retail, those bits would have been well over £2K. I therefore don't find it strange, and I suppose in a roundabout way your incredulity was aimed at people like me. If a family is keen enough, and lays enough store by quality, then they can do what they want with their money.

 

[e-rider]

Perhaps "sniping " was a poor choice of words.

I suppose it's all about what folk want to spend their money on. I always find it funny on here when someone asks "what hardtail should I get with my budget of £1,500 and someone always pipes up with "Spend £300 on a Rockrider and spend the change on lentils."

My lad is a mad keen MTB rider. For his 13th birthday I built him a Ragley that cost him £1500 in parts alone. That was using discounted parts. Retail, those bits would have been well over £2K. I therefore don't find it strange, and I suppose in a roundabout way your incredulity was aimed at people like me. If a family is keen enough, and lays enough store by quality, then they can do what they want with their money.

People can indeed do what they want with their money, however, spending such sums of cash on any bike, including 'kids' bikes, is quite far from reality for many UK families, who simply can't relate to ever having so much spare cash, so such issues will always attract certain types of comment.

As a rough calculation £20K (the total value of the bikes) is about 15 years worth of disposible income for me, and my income is slightly above the UK average.

 

[Chromatic]

Very bad news.
If you can afford to spend £20000 on bikes why choose to live near Hetsers Way though?

 

[Silver Fox]

Clearly a job done by a crew who knew what was in the garage. I've said it before, when to comes to where you store your bike(s), you really do need to be aware of who's around. I let my guard down last year and that ended in tears. The new bike now lives in my back bedroom.

As for bike thieves, here's hoping they all poo hedgehogs for the rest of eternity.

 

[postman]

If that was me,as posted there would have been a cage inside the garage,no ifs or buts,i have thought about that before.

 

[geo]

gutted for them, whether you think a 12 year old should have a bike of that value is another debate, but clearly a cycling mad family has had their lives invaded by some little shoot who has no value or respect for other people, or how others may suffer as a result of this. I hope they are caught and get a proper sentence for it.

 

[Norm]

Is today thread resurrection day or something?

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

A 12 year old with a bike that expensive?

They clearly must have more brass than sense that lot!

 

[screenman]

Maybe they had a lot of sense to get all that brass.

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

Maybe they had a lot of sense to get all that brass.

Maybe, but how long before the boy grows out of it? Annyway, if it makes/made them happy and all that.

 

[screenman]

If anyone thinks parents spend a lot of money on cycles for their kids it is worth having a look at some of the other sports. Motorcross, kart racing, in fact anything with an engine boy do those guys know how to spend it.

There might have been some slight artistic license used on pricing the bikes for the report.

 

[Drago]

No insurance, no security beyond the standard garage door lock? Hard to have sympathy for those that don't help themselves, especially as they have been victims of bike theft twice before and still not bothered themselves to do anything whatsoever. And since when did 'new' prices indicate what the bike is now 'worth'?

Mind you, a chap up the road from me is no better - his double garage is full of worthless tat, while his valuable Aston DB9 sits on the driveway all night.

In my experience a lot of this is likely to end up broken down and the components sold via ebay etc, though the frames may present a bit more of a challenge, even if they did have a record of the frame numbers, which seems unlikely.

 

[dellzeqq]

someone clearly knew what they had.

M&S home contents insurance insures any number of bikes up to £4000 EACH - that would cover most of it! Perhaps they should have shopped about owning such a collection of expensive bikes.

Home and contents insurance rip off from AXA via Marks and Spencer – claim refused
Posted on 28 February 2011

Following the theft of eight of our bicycles last week, the response from the readers of this blog, as well as hundreds of people on Twitter, Facebook, YACF, Cyclechat, LFGSS and various other forums has been awesome. I don’t think I’ve had as many page views as I had for the post I made on the 24th and it’s amazing to see the way that the cycling community comes together when someone asks for some help. So thank you to everyone; Julian and I are really grateful.

Although our search for the missing bikes continues, I thought I’d post and tell you about the Insurance company. Like a lot of other cycling households, we have our house and contents cover provided by Marks and Spencer. They were recommended to us for their high quality cover and good customer service. M&S insurance offers a lot of benefits to cyclists, including a high value for each cycle and unlimited cycles on the policy. It’s a bit pricier than other cheaper insurers, but with around twenty bikes between us, including a Santana tandem, we wanted good cover so we were happy to pay for it.

When I took out the policy a couple of years ago, I specifically asked whether we would be covered in our rented garage one street away from the house. They said yes. I was so concerned that I asked for a letter to be sent to me that made mention of this and thankfully we still have that letter in our files.

When I called up the claims line after we discovered the burglary, we were initially told that we weren’t covered at this address because we were in the process of moving house. Julian had called them to arrange transfer of our policy from the old place to the new place and informed them of the date of the move. Despite us still living at the old address when I claimed last week, they had our electronic records as the new address so they said we weren’t covered.

Needless to say, once the situation was explained (at length – this took a number of phone calls) this was sorted out. The address was right, we did do what we were supposed to do. However…

The man on the end of the phone explained to me that “on this occasion Miss Barnes, we’re sorry to say that we won’t be able to take this claim forward any further…” (don’t you just hate the weasel words these people use?)

He went onto explain that although we were covered when we took the policy out, M&S have subsequently changed our insurance providers from Aviva to AXA. He said that we were sent a booklet that illustrated the policy changes between the two companies and one of them was that we were no longer covered in our rented garage. Now, needless to say, we still have these booklets and both reading them back then as well as again now, this policy change is far from clear. Had it have been, we would most certainly have raised this as an issue because the whole point of this policy was to cover our precious bicycles.

I was stunned – I couldn’t believe that they were doing this to us. I think I used some fairly frank language to the man from M&S – I must have done, he threatened to hang up the call on me (In the event it was me who hung up on him). Clearly, for high value claims, their tactic is to refuse payment as soon as possible. Interestingly, although AXA had a good reputation, Aviva had more consumer complaints referred to the financial ombudsman (FOS) than any other insurer in the last six months of last year.

Julian has subsequently explained Lord Denning’s Big Red Hand to me and it would appear that we have a very good chance of overturning this decision at the Ombudsman. But until then folks, check your insurance policies VERY carefully.

And whatever you do, don’t buy an insurance policy from Marks and Spencers or AXA. Especially if you’re relying on it to cover your valuable bicycles.

On a happier note, the bikes were recovered by the Met team led by you know who of this very parish

 

[gavintc]

someone clearly knew what they had.

M&S home contents insurance insures any number of bikes up to £4000 EACH - that would cover most of it! Perhaps they should have shopped about owning such a collection of expensive bikes.

Thanks for the tip - will look at them when it comes time for renewal.

Edit: Oops - just read the rest of this thread

 

[e-rider]

Thanks for the tip - will look at them when it comes time for renewal.

Edit: Oops - just read the rest of this thread

I think the fact that they had their bikes in a rented garage at a different address made this more complicated. M&S are still worth a look but make sure you check all the small print (as with any policy)