In 2022 the Commercial Court heard about a 1948 Talbot Lago that rolled into a Mercedes CLK GTR on a transporter coming back from France. One car was worth 2.25 million pounds, the other 9.5 million euros. The carrier’s liability came out at a small fraction of either, because an international treaty limits it by the weight of the car, not its value.
Almost nobody who stores a car knows that rule exists. This article is the one nobody in car storage wants to write: who actually covers your car while it is stored and moved, where the gaps are, and the questions worth asking in writing before the car goes anywhere. It is general information rather than advice, and your own policy wording is the final word throughout.
Yes, unless it has been declared off the road. Under Continuous Insurance Enforcement, a registered vehicle must be insured at all times unless the keeper has made a Statutory Off Road Notification, a SORN. That applies even to a car locked in a private building that never turns a wheel. The test is the declaration, not where the car sits.
The consequences of being neither insured nor declared are not theoretical. A fixed penalty of £100, the vehicle clamped, impounded or destroyed, and a court fine of up to £1,000. The obligation sits with the registered keeper, and it does not lapse because the car is somewhere secure.
Three things. The legal requirement to insure ends. Any full remaining months of road tax are refunded automatically. And the car can no longer touch a public road, with one exception: driving to or from a pre booked MOT or testing appointment. A SORN does not expire and does not need renewing. It ends when the car is taxed, sold, exported or scrapped.
Two details catch people out. Driving a SORN’d car for any other reason risks prosecution and a fine of up to £2,500. And older guides still say a SORN must be renewed each year, which has not been true since 2013. It persists on its own.
Because SORN removes the road, not the risks. Fire, theft, vandalism and accidental damage do not care whether a car is taxed. The product built for this is laid up cover, sold by the specialist classic insurers, which typically covers fire, theft and damage while the car is off the road, usually on condition it is kept in a locked building.
Footman James, ClassicLine and Adrian Flux all sell it, and their own guidance is blunt: a SORN’d car does not need to be insured, and keeping cover in place is usually advisable anyway. What the tiers include varies. Some policies are fire and theft only, with accidental damage as a separate level. Some include transit within the UK. The wording, not the product name, tells you which one you have.
Do not assume so, because there is no law that says it must. A storage business typically holds motor trade insurance for its own liabilities, covering customer cars in its custody and while being moved. But storing entirely at the owner’s risk is lawful and common, and several operators’ published terms require the customer to insure the car themselves.
Read the terms before the car arrives, because this market does everything from full custodial cover to a sentence making the car your problem. Published conditions in this sector include requirements that the customer insures the vehicle to its full value at all times, minimum fire and theft requirements as a condition of storage, and liability caps at a fixed sum per vehicle. A cap of £100,000 per car appears in published terms in this market. On a £100,000 car that is fine. On the kind of car that usually justifies professional storage, it may be a fraction of the value, and it is sitting in a document most owners never read.
Leaving a car with a storage business for payment creates what English law calls a bailment for reward. The business owes a duty of reasonable care, and the helpful part for owners is the burden of proof: once you show the car was damaged in their custody, it is for the business to show the damage happened without any failure on their part, not for you to prove what went wrong.
That default comes from the Court of Appeal in Houghland v R R Low, decided in 1962 and still the reference point. Two honest caveats belong next to it. Reasonable care is not strict liability, so a business that did everything properly is not liable for, say, a lightning strike. And contract terms can modify the default, which is precisely why the terms deserve reading. Whether a particular exclusion would survive a fairness challenge under consumer law depends on the clause, and nothing here should be read as a prediction about any specific contract.
Only if the insurer knows where the car is. Where a car is kept overnight is a standard rating question, and under the consumer insurance disclosure rules, an answer that is wrong or never updated gives the insurer options you do not want it to have: applying restrictions retroactively, settling a claim proportionally rather than in full, or voiding the policy.
That is the mechanism, and it is worth being precise about, because the folklore version is wrong in both directions. We could not find a mainstream policy with a blanket clause excluding commercial storage, so the car is not automatically uncovered the day it arrives. But the Financial Ombudsman’s published position on misrepresentation is exactly as described above, and storage operators themselves tell customers to notify their insurer before storing. One phone call, and the question disappears. Specialist insurers also say plainly that limited use and secure storage contribute to lower premiums, so the call is as likely to save money as cost it.
Everything, on the day it matters. Under a market value policy, a total loss is settled at what a depreciation database says the car is worth that day. Under an agreed value policy, insurer and owner fix the figure when cover starts, and that is what a total loss pays, less any excess or retained salvage. For a car whose value sits in its history and condition rather than its age and mileage, the difference can be enormous.
The specialist insurers offer agreed value and will usually ask for photographs and sometimes an independent valuation to set the figure. For a car going into storage for years, there is a second point hiding here: values move while cars sit still. An agreed value set five years ago may bear no relation to the market now, in either direction, which is a reason to revisit the figure, not just set it once.
Within the UK, normally the operator’s motor trade and transit cover, and your own policy generally does not cover professional carriage. Across borders it changes completely. International road carriage falls under a treaty called CMR, which limits the carrier’s liability by the weight of the goods rather than their value, and the limit holds even when the carrier was negligent.
That is what the Talbot Lago case decided. The treaty applied even though no consignment note had been issued, and ordinary negligence is not the wilful misconduct needed to break the limit, so an eight figure incident resolved at a weight based fraction of it. Cars are the worst possible cargo for a weight based limit, because they concentrate enormous value into modest kilograms. The route around it exists: a declared value or special interest entered on the consignment note, against a surcharge. If a car worth serious money is crossing a border, that declaration, in writing, is the single most important sentence in the whole arrangement.
For most owners using professional car storage, the working combination is: tell your insurer where the car is, or move to a laid up policy if the car is coming off the road, hold agreed value cover if the car’s worth lives in its history rather than its age, and read the storage terms so you know exactly what the facility’s own insurance does and does not carry.
None of those four steps costs much, three of them cost nothing, and each one closes a different gap. The insurer call closes the disclosure gap. Laid up cover closes the fire and theft gap on a SORN’d car. Agreed value closes the settlement gap. Reading the terms closes the gap between what you assume the car storage facility covers and what its conditions actually say. The owners who get caught are almost never the ones who skipped all four. They are the ones who did three and assumed the fourth.
Six questions cover almost everything above, and they work on any car storage facility in the country. The answers matter less than how readily they arrive. An operator who insures properly will answer in a paragraph, in writing, without checking. An operator who cannot answer is answering too.
Henry’s Car Barn has provided secure car storage and collection management since 1984, from sites in Warwickshire, Hampshire, West Sussex, London and Northumberland. Collection and delivery run on our own transporter, UK wide and to and from Europe, handled by the same people who store the car.
Bring these six questions with you. We would rather walk through them before the car arrives than have anyone discover the answers afterwards, and we will put ours in writing, because that is the point of the exercise.
Nothing in this article is financial or legal advice. Policies differ, terms differ, and the penalty figures quoted are the government’s published numbers as of the date of writing. Your insurer, your broker and your own policy wording come first.
