Pranged car - excessive claim

[BouquetNotBucket01]

Hello! I pranged a park car on a narrow road on a dark night two weeks ago. I stopped and knocked on the door of the closest house and the chap was the owner. I have him my details and waited for a quote from his garage. It was dark, I was shaken and took one wobbly photo of wheel hub scratches. The quote has come back for four separate areas of repair at nearly £1500 - about half the value of his 2011 car. Should I claim through insurance? How horrendous will make premium be next year? It was only 320 pounds this year. I should add that it is the second claim we have had to make as our car was stolen two months ago and the immobilizer was vandalized so we had to get this replaced as well as the keys.
Is there a time limit for reporting damage to insurers? We have a small dent on our bumper too.

Hi, you have to report the accident regardless of whether you claim or not. It’s a condition of your policy and if you don’t, your insurance could be invalidated.

Oh cripes how long do I have? It’s not clear in the policy

I'd report that to the insurance and let them take care of it.

When you say wheel hub, do you mean the wheel arch? It sounds expensive, but sometimes things can be expensive with larger areas having to be repainted for a match. Unless the car is his pride and joy, I can't imagine he would spend £1500 on that kind of repair for that age of car. Anyway, best to let the insurer handle it as they will have approved garages and take care of it with him directly. I wouldn't think your premium increase should be too terrible for a scratch.

You should have reported it at the time - it may be too late to go through insurance now.

I have 24h to tell mine about any accidents.

Difficult to say but sometimes hey have to spray the full panel and was it definitely just the one panel
problem with insurance the will bump price up even more cost of assessor picking it up and do on
unfortunately for the poor person involved they could possibly Write the car of they will loose out massively

I feel sick with anxiety now. Really cannot afford the 1.5k and I have never had an accident before. There is no specified limit on my policy but it says as soon as possible.

I suspect that your insurance company will deem his car a write off.

Can’t get through to the insurers! Been on hold for half an hour three times today. They say to call back as they’re swamped due to icy conditions. I hope his car isn’t a write off. Think the damage is about 40% the value of his car.

Then it's likely it will be declared a right-off.

Financially it makes no sense to repair a car to that value, especially an old one.

Body repairs are stupidly expensive. A young girl scraped my car a few weeks after passing her test, and I was happy for her dad to pay for the repairs rather than go through her insurance.

I called at three nearby body shops for estimates and was astounded at the cost. It's a very time consuming business it seems, so even a small scrape adds up.

That's probably not that unreasonable. Go through the insurance.

And 2 weeks is fine - it's very common for people to try and sort it out themselves and then find it's too expensive so notify the insurance at that point.

Not sure really.
I had someone scrape the back of my car maybe 4 inches - no dent
I had 3 quotes from £600-£900
I got it done for £300
I shopped around as the girl who hit my car was young and very apologetic and I guessed was not in a lot of funds.