What is UK Breakdown Cover?

UK breakdown cover is insurance that offers you protection for your car if it breaks down whilst within the United Kingdom. Unlike European breakdown cover, you’ll only be covered nationally, rather than internationally.

UK breakdown cover is our most popular type of policy we offer, and with good reason. According to gov.uk there are roughly 200,000 motorway breakdowns each year in the UK. Motorway breakdowns can be some of the most stressful breakdowns situation to be in. It’s often very busy and without breakdown cover in place you could be stranded for some time.

Our UK breakdown cover helps keep you prepared should the worst happen on your journey and you’re caught out by a break down.

Our UK Breakdown policies offer a wide range of benefits to help you out when you’re on the road, from standard roadside assistance, to home-start and misfuelling cover. For the full list of your policy benefits, check our policy wordings, which you can find once you click "Get Quotes".

With our UK breakdown cover, you can breakdown anywhere within England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland and receive roadside assistance.

Our UK Breakdown Cover provides a whole host of policy benefits including:

Roadside Assistance

All our policies offer roadside assistance as standard. Regardless off the cover you choose, your assistance provider will attempt to fix your broken-down car at the roadside.

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Roadside Recovery

Depending on whether you choose local or national cover, and if your car can’t be fixed at the roadside, you’ll be offered recovery to a garage where they can try and solve the problem.

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Onward Travel

If the fixing of your vehicle is taking longer than expected, with some of our policies, you can request alternative transport to get to your desired location. Often this can be the reimbursed cost of public transport or a taxi.

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Home start

Another optional extra in some of our policies is home start – which provides you and your vehicle with cover should you breakdown at or within 1 mile of your home address. This is a really handy benefit to have, because there’s nothing more annoying than your own broken down car on your driveway and no way to get it fixed, having home start included in the cover can help save you a whole load of headaches.

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Unlike car insurance, it’s not a legal requirement to have breakdown cover in the UK for your vehicle. For obvious reasons, it’s highly recommended, but never mandatory. For people who drive regularly or drive long distances it’s an important safety net to have and can help save you £100’s if you do break down.

What’s the difference between local and national cover?

It’s important to remember that we offer both local and national cover policies and it’s probably worthwhile making sure you know the difference between the two. With local cover, if your car can’t be fixed by the roadside, you’ll only be offered recovery to a garage within a certain distance of where you’ve broken down, usually up to a distance of 10 or 25 miles, depending on the policy type.

With national cover, you can be recovered to a garage of your choosing anywhere in the UK. This is a much more popular policy type as it means you can be taken much closer to your final destination point and therefore save you time, and stress, in the long run.

Can I upgrade my UK cover to European?

Unfortunately, because we work with our Breakdown partners, rather than supply the insurance ourselves, you cannot upgrade your policy after you’ve bought it, but we can arrange European cover for you by using our contact us form, just fill in your policy details and the cover your require (this could be single trip or annual European cover) and our customer service team will get right on it for you and will be in touch.

What if I need to make a change?

You can make admin changes to your policy via our contact us form. It’s incredibly easy; just fill in your policy details and the change you’d like to make (for example: change your vehicle) and our customer service team will get right on it for you.

Looking for Personal Breakdown Cover?

Before you go ahead and choose your UK breakdown cover, you might want to consider selecting our Personal breakdown cover option. This may suit your needs more, depending on how many different vehicles you drive. Essentially, personal breakdown cover insures you, the driver, rather than your car. We do offer personal breakdown cover for the UK and if you’d like to know more about this then head to our Personal Breakdown Cover Page.