Au pair - car insurance

[manichj]

We've had 3 au pairs over the last 2 years and it has worked really well. However, insuring the car (just replaced the BMW with a Golf to make it more au pair friendly) is inordinately expensive as insurance companies take fright at both their age and the fact that they've only just arrived in UK (albeit from EU) and so can't tick the resident in the UK for more than 12 months box. Any bright ideas or advice?

can you not name then and just have insurance as any driver - or would this be even more expensive?

That's what we've done in the past - renewal quote was £2k! Seem to think any driver insurance only covers over 25s and our au pairs tend to be 19-20 (German's who are taking a gap year before uni)

Try Tesco Value (you can only do it via the tesco site - not via moneysupermarket or similar sites -they only look at the normal Tesco insurance packages). these were the only ones approaching reasonable when I had a 19 YO.

Just to add to the car insurance woes - trying to reinsure car - one insurance company said that au pair driving my DCs around in my car was business use and so would not insure (we have always considered it to be SDP in the past). Another said that as she is Canadian they would not insure her to drive a manual car as all Canadian licences are "automatic" licences, despite the fact that that there is only one type of licence in Canada.

I went with LV direct they came up with the best qote.

Virgin offer insurance too as well as Tesco.

this is why each of my APs has been over 21

Is the car for au pair's use only? Our au pair uses my car (ie. I use it in evenings) so insurance is in my name with her as named driver, first au pair was 19yr old German and cost £300 on top of my usual premium.
Having said that, I have to re-insure in sept and I'm already worrying how much it'll be.
Our insurer (Quinn) counts au pair driving as SDandP.