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Non-fault drivers in London
If another driver caused your accident anywhere in Greater London, you should not be left without a vehicle. CityGrip arranges recovery, secure storage and a replacement that is ULEZ compliant across all 33 boroughs, including licensed, plated vehicles insured for hire and reward for private hire and PCO drivers. You pay nothing upfront, subject to liability being established and to reasonable need.
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Yes. If you were not at fault in a London accident, you are normally entitled to a replacement vehicle for as long as yours is off the road, and you pay nothing upfront. CityGrip arranges it on a credit hire basis, which means the at-fault driver's insurer is billed rather than you. Provision is subject to liability being established and to reasonable need. Because the ULEZ now covers every London borough, we supply compliant vehicles as standard, and licensed, plated replacements insured for hire and reward for private hire and PCO drivers who need to keep working.
Key points
London stopped having an emissions boundary you could plan around on 29 August 2023, when the Ultra Low Emission Zone expanded to cover every London borough. There is no longer an inner zone to stay outside of: if you are driving in Greater London, you are in the ULEZ. It runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year except Christmas Day, and a non-compliant car or van pays £12.50 for each day it is driven inside the zone. The standards are broadly Euro 4 for petrol and Euro 6 for diesel, and the only significant carve-out is the M25 itself, which sits outside the zone even where the motorway runs inside the Greater London boundary.
That single fact changes what a replacement vehicle after a non-fault accident actually has to be. A vehicle sourced from a depot outside London, or an older pool car pulled off a forecourt, can easily be non-compliant, and the moment it is delivered to a London address the driver starts paying £12.50 a day simply to use it. That is a running cost created entirely by someone else's driving, and it is not one you should be absorbing. CityGrip checks the emissions status of every vehicle against its registration before it leaves for a London delivery, and we treat compliance as part of the specification rather than a detail to sort out afterwards.
Vans need a second check. The ULEZ applies to vans up to and including 3.5 tonnes gross vehicle weight, and above that threshold a vehicle falls under the separate Low Emission Zone, which also covers most of Greater London and also runs 24 hours a day, every day of the year. LEZ charges for non-compliant heavier vehicles are far steeper than the ULEZ daily rate, so a well-meaning upgrade from a 3.5 tonne van to something larger can quietly create a serious daily cost. We match van to van on gross vehicle weight as well as on load space, and we will tell you plainly if the closest available match crosses that line.
London is also not one driving environment, which is why this page sits above four more detailed ones. A driver in Barnet or Enfield is dealing with the North Circular, long outer-borough distances and arterial routes into the centre. A driver in Newham or Barking is dealing with the river crossings and the Dartford charge. A driver in Croydon or Bromley is dealing with tram corridors and sprawling outer-borough geography. A driver in Hounslow or Hillingdon is dealing with Heathrow traffic and the western motorway approaches. The compliance rules are identical in all 33 local authority areas, but the practical business of getting a vehicle to you is not.
The Central London Congestion Charge is a separate scheme with a separate boundary, and it changed on 2 January 2026 when the daily rate rose from £15 to £18. It applies from 07:00 to 18:00 Monday to Friday and from 12:00 to 18:00 on Saturdays, Sundays and bank holidays. Pay late and the amount rises to £21 if it is settled by midnight on the third day after travel. There is one genuinely free window in the year: no charge applies between Christmas Day and the New Year's Day bank holiday inclusive. Unlike the ULEZ, this scheme is time-limited and geographically tight, so it bites hardest on drivers who cross the middle of the city during the working day.
The point most people miss after an accident is that Congestion Charge discounts and exemptions attach to a registration mark, not to a person. The residents' discount is registered against one specific vehicle. Auto Pay is set up per vehicle. The electric vehicle discounts introduced on 2 January 2026, a 25 per cent reduction for electric cars and 50 per cent for electric vans, are only available to vehicles registered for Auto Pay. None of that follows you into a courtesy car. If your own vehicle was zero emission, or carried a residents' discount, the replacement starts from zero and will be charged at the standard daily rate unless you register it yourself.
Private hire drivers have been in this position since 8 April 2019, when the Congestion Charge exemption for private hire vehicles was removed. Only wheelchair accessible private hire vehicles kept it. If you work central London you are already treating the daily charge as a cost of doing business, but you need to know before you accept a replacement whether it is registered, what it will cost you per working day, and whether it qualifies for any reduced rate. We tell you the registration and the charging position at handover rather than letting you discover it from a penalty notice a fortnight later.
Practically, the first thing to do when a replacement arrives is to look honestly at where you actually drive. If your normal week takes you inside the zone during charging hours, register the replacement's registration mark for Auto Pay on day one and cancel it when the vehicle goes back. If you hold a residents' discount, check whether a temporary registration change is possible with your borough. Keep every receipt. Additional motoring costs caused by a non-fault accident can sometimes be presented to the at-fault insurer, and they can only be presented if somebody recorded them at the time.
LONDON
Section 3 of the walkthrough.
No other part of the United Kingdom has anything like London's population of working drivers. Transport for London licenses well over 100,000 private hire drivers and more than 90,000 private hire vehicles, and a very large proportion of those drivers own the car they work in. For them a non-fault accident is not an inconvenience about the school run. It is a complete stop to income, and every day without a working, licensed vehicle is a day of earnings gone. That changes what a replacement vehicle has to be, and it changes how quickly the conversation needs to happen after the collision.
An ordinary courtesy car cannot lawfully be used for private hire work, and this is not a grey area. A private hire vehicle must be licensed by Transport for London and display its licence discs, and it must be insured for hire and reward. TfL requires hire or reward insurance to be in place when the vehicle is licensed and to remain in place throughout the licence. A standard replacement supplied on a social, domestic, pleasure and commuting policy meets none of that. Working in it exposes you to driving without valid insurance, to licensing action, to seizure of the vehicle, and to deactivation by the operator whose app you work through.
So the replacement for a working London driver is a different product entirely: a vehicle that already holds a current TfL private hire vehicle licence, displays its plates and discs, and sits on a policy written for hire and reward. CityGrip sources plated replacements rather than substituting an ordinary car and hoping the driver does not notice the difference until the first job. Where an operator sets its own age or model requirements for a particular service tier, tell us at the outset, because a plated vehicle that will not accept your usual work is only half a solution.
Getting this right also protects the financial side of your claim. A non-fault driver is expected to keep losses down, and a driver who sits at home for six weeks claiming lost earnings while declining a suitable licensed replacement is in a much weaker position than one who accepted a plated vehicle and kept working. Taking the correct replacement quickly is both the practical answer and the sensible one for the claim. It is worth saying plainly that CityGrip works with cars and vans, including private hire and PCO vehicles, and does not take on hackney carriage, HGV, bus or coach work.
TfL's red routes, formally the Transport for London Road Network, make up around five per cent of London's road length but carry more than 30 per cent of its traffic. Double red lines mean no stopping at any time, on any day, with no time plate required. Single red lines carry restrictions during the hours shown on the nearby sign. There are narrow exceptions, including for Blue Badge holders and for licensed taxis and some private hire vehicles setting down or picking up passengers, but a recovery truck loading a damaged car is not one of them. That single rule shapes how a London recovery has to be planned from the first phone call.
It means that where your vehicle stopped matters enormously. A car left on the A2, the A13, the A40 or the A406 cannot simply be winched onto a truck at the roadside while traffic flows past. The recovery has to be coordinated, sometimes with the police and sometimes with TfL, and occasionally the vehicle has to be moved a short distance to a safe loading point first. On borough roads the position is different again, because those are enforced by the local council under a different regime with different bay markings and different hours. We will not give you an invented arrival time for a London recovery, because London does not reliably allow one.
River crossings add their own layer. The Silvertown Tunnel opened on 7 April 2025, and on the same day user charges were introduced at both Silvertown and the neighbouring Blackwall Tunnel. Cars and small vans pay £1.50 off peak on Auto Pay and £4.00 at peak, with peak defined as 06:00 to 10:00 northbound and 16:00 to 19:00 southbound on weekdays. Larger vans pay £2.50 off peak and £6.50 at peak. Charges apply between 06:00 and 22:00 every day including bank holidays, Christmas Day is free, and both tunnels are free overnight from 22:00 to 06:00.
Then come the physical limits, which matter far more to a recovery truck than to a car. The Blackwall Tunnel has a height restriction of four metres northbound and 4.7 metres southbound. The Rotherhithe Tunnel, which opened in 1908, prohibits any vehicle over two metres wide or two metres high and any goods vehicle over two tonnes gross vehicle weight, enforced by camera. A loaded transporter is therefore excluded from Rotherhithe entirely and frequently from Blackwall northbound, which pushes cross-river recovery onto Silvertown, the central bridges or, further east, the Dartford Crossing, where the Dart Charge for a car has been £3.50 pay as you go, or £2.80 on a pre-pay account, since 1 September 2025.
Finally, London's calendar closes roads in ways no navigation app predicts well. The August bank holiday carnival closes a large grid of streets across Kensington and Chelsea and part of Westminster for several days. The spring marathon closes a route running from Greenwich through Tower Hamlets, Southwark, the City and into Westminster. Summer mass-participation cycling events close corridors out through east London. Add stadium event days, state occasions and utility works, and you have a network where a fifteen minute journey becomes an hour with no warning. INRIX put the average London driver's time lost to congestion at 91 hours in 2025, around ten per cent below the 101 hours recorded in 2024, with London still the most congested place in the country.
The mechanism that makes a genuinely like-for-like replacement possible without you paying is credit hire. In plain terms, a provider supplies the vehicle and defers payment, and the cost is then presented to the at-fault driver's insurer as part of your claim, because putting you back on the road is a loss that driver caused. You do not pay a deposit. You do not pay a weekly or monthly charge. There is no card held on file against the vehicle. The word hire in credit hire describes the legal arrangement between the provider and the insurer, not a bill that lands with you.
It is not unconditional, and any company that tells you otherwise is not being straight with you. A replacement depends on liability being established or clearly resting with the other driver, and on reasonable need, which means you actually had use of a vehicle before the accident and you actually need one now. The period has to be reasonable too, running while the vehicle is genuinely off the road for repair, or until a total loss valuation is settled and you have the funds to replace the car. A vehicle kept for months after a settlement has been paid is not a recoverable loss.
CityGrip assesses liability before supplying a vehicle rather than afterwards. If the accident is one where fault is genuinely contested, or where the account you have given does not support a non-fault position, we will say so and discuss the alternatives instead of putting a vehicle on your drive and dealing with the consequences later. The credit hire agreement is a real document with real obligations, and we go through it with you in plain English before anything is signed, including what happens in the small number of cases where liability is not recovered from the other side.
You may also be contacted directly by the at-fault driver's insurer offering you a vehicle. That offer is worth understanding rather than dismissing out of hand. It removes the credit hire arrangement altogether, which some people prefer. What it very often does not do is match your vehicle: the offer is frequently a small category car with no regard to whether you drove a seven seater, a van or a plated private hire vehicle. For a working London driver an unplated car has no value at all. Compare the actual specification, not just the speed of the offer, and remember that accepting a vehicle from the third party can affect how other parts of your claim are handled.
Almost all of inner London and a great deal of outer London sits inside a controlled parking zone, and permits across the capital are now overwhelmingly virtual, meaning enforcement officers check a registration mark against a database rather than looking for a paper disc in the windscreen. Your existing residents' permit therefore does absolutely nothing for a replacement vehicle. The registration on the permit is not the replacement's registration, and a virtual permit cannot be lent to a different car. This catches out more non-fault drivers than any other single administrative detail, and the penalty charge notices start arriving within days.
Boroughs handle it in genuinely different ways, so a single instruction for the whole of London does not exist. Some councils issue a dedicated courtesy vehicle permit: Waltham Forest, for example, offers a courtesy permit valid for two weeks. Others provide free temporary cover on an existing permit while your own vehicle is off the road, as Hounslow does. Others will not let you edit a permit's registration at all and require you to cancel and reapply, or to take out a separate temporary resident permit for a fixed number of weeks. Check your own borough's parking pages within a day of taking delivery, not a week later.
We help by giving you everything the application will ask for at handover: the replacement's registration mark, the agreement showing why you have the vehicle, and confirmation of the expected dates. What we cannot do is pay a penalty charge notice issued because a replacement was parked on a resident bay without cover, so the twenty minutes spent on the borough website is genuinely worth it. The same logic applies to the damaged vehicle. Left on a red route or in a suspended bay it will accrue charges or be removed to a pound, and release fees plus daily storage build up faster than most people expect.
That is why recovery and secure storage are treated as a single step rather than two. The damaged vehicle comes off the road and into a secure compound rather than sitting outside your flat collecting notices or being picked over for parts. An independent engineer inspects it there, photographs the damage and produces the report that drives either the repair authorisation or the total loss valuation. Repairs are then coordinated with a qualified repairer, and the replacement vehicle stays with you until that work is finished or the total loss is settled, not until an insurer decides it would rather stop paying.
Step by step
Replacement vehicle support for non-fault drivers across North London.
Courtesy car in East London →Replacement vehicle support for non-fault drivers across East London.
Courtesy car in South London →Replacement vehicle support for non-fault drivers across South London.
Courtesy car in West London →Replacement vehicle support for non-fault drivers across West London.
Credit hire vs courtesy car →What the difference means for who pays.
Courtesy car after an accident (UK) →The national guide to replacement vehicles.
PCO courtesy car →Why a standard courtesy car cannot be worked in.
Important notice
A replacement vehicle is subject to liability being established, to your eligibility and to reasonable need. Recovery, storage, repair and replacement vehicle costs are recovered from the at-fault driver's insurer rather than paid by you, but that depends on the evidential record and on liability being accepted or proven. We do not provide legal advice and we do not handle personal injury in-house: injury enquiries are referred only with your separate written consent to authorised legal or regulated partners. Information about the ULEZ, the Congestion Charge, tunnel charges and parking regimes is general guidance and can change; check the current position for your own journey and vehicle.
The fastest way is to call. Or start the digital accident form and our team will pick it up. Available across England, Scotland & Wales.
Calls may be recorded for quality and compliance. We do not provide legal advice. Personal injury enquiries are referred only with your consent to authorised partners.
Visit our team
London office
124 City Road
London, EC1V 2NX
Talk to a handler
Had a non-fault accident? Leave your details and a handler calls you straight back, 24/7. No long forms to start, and no upfront cost - the costs are recovered from the at-fault driver's insurer, not from you.
Prefer to call? 0333 335 7686 - 24/7.