A CUSTOMER has staged a one-man protest outside Aviva’s York headquarters in the latest phase of a three-year insurance dispute.

Self-employed plant hire operator Paul Parvin, 45, from Sessay, near Thirsk, sat on a deckchair for several hours on land near the entrance to the insurance giant’s building in Rougier Street, holding a protest sign.

Mr Parvin said he had an engineering and motor insurance policy with Aviva and, about three years ago, a 38-tonne articulated truck crashed into the rear of his excavator on a dual carriageway near Thirsk, causing severe damage.

He claimed Aviva advised him to claim on the truck’s insurance policy and he did so. Both insurance companies sent assessors to view the vehicle, and the truck insurer’s assessor decided it should be repaired. The truck’s insurers assured him it would work properly afterwards, even though he believed the damage was so bad it should be written off.

The excavator was returned to him seven months later, but he immediately experienced problems, for example, with the brakes, and a brake test deemed the vehicle unfit for the road, and he went back to Aviva.

He said the company cancelled his insurance in February last year and he was left unable to work.

Aviva had since offered to buy the machine for £31,500, almost representing its value at the time of the accident, but he said it had offered no compensation for the loss of two years’ income, and he had now decided he had no option but to take direct action by staging the protest.

An Aviva spokesman said it had made what it believed was a fair and reasonable offer to Mr Parvin, after he had opted to pursue a claim through a third-party insurer following the accident.

However, Mr Parvin had made a complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which would consider the matter independently, and Aviva would respect its ruling.