What Is askMID and What Does It Show?

askMID is the public front end of the Motor Insurance Database, the industry record of vehicles covered by a UK motor policy. You can check whether your own vehicle is showing as insured for free at ownvehicle.askmid.com. You cannot freely look up somebody else's car, and even if you could, insurance status tells you almost nothing about whether a used car is safe to buy.

Quick answer

• Your own vehicle: free at ownvehicle.askmid.com. Enter the registration and you get a yes or a no.
• Another vehicle: only through the paid enquiry route, and only if you were involved in a road traffic accident with it. You need the date, time and place.
• What it shows: whether the vehicle appears on a live policy right now. Nothing about the past.
• What it does not show: finance, write-off markers, theft markers, mileage or keeper history.

What the Motor Insurance Database is

The MID is run by the Motor Insurers' Bureau. Insurers upload details of the policies they write, and the database becomes the single place to answer one question: is this vehicle insured. Police ANPR cameras read plates against it, which is how uninsured cars get pulled over and seized. DVLA uses the same data for continuous insurance enforcement.

Continuous insurance enforcement is worth understanding if you own a car you are not currently using. A vehicle registered in the UK must be insured unless it has a valid SORN. If it is neither, the registered keeper named on the V5C can be fined, whether or not anybody has driven it. Leaving a car sitting on the drive without a SORN is the most common way people trip over this.

Checking your own vehicle for free

Go to ownvehicle.askmid.com, enter the registration, and it confirms whether the vehicle appears on the database. Two quirks are worth knowing before you panic at the result.

• New policies can lag. Insurers and brokers upload in batches, so a policy taken out this morning may not appear for a few days. A blank result on brand new cover is usually a delay rather than a problem. If it persists, chase the broker rather than assume you are covered.
• Trade policies work differently. A dealer's stock is covered by a motor trade policy rather than by a per vehicle entry. A car sitting on a forecourt can show as not insured while being entirely legal.

Checking somebody else's vehicle

There is a paid enquiry route for people who have been in an accident. You supply the other vehicle's registration plus the date, time and location of the collision, and you get the insurer's details so you can pursue a claim. That is its purpose. It is not a general lookup service.

You cannot use askMID to check a neighbour's car, a car parked outside your house, or a car you are thinking of buying. Policy data is personal data and it is not published. If the reason you wanted to look is that you are considering buying the car, insurance status was never going to answer your real question anyway.

Why insured status tells a buyer very little

Insurance follows the policy and the driver. It says nothing about the car's history, its identity, or who has a financial claim over it.

That last point is the one that costs people money. If a car is sold with an outstanding hire purchase, PCP or conditional sale agreement against it, the finance company still owns it and can recover it from you. A live insurance policy does nothing to protect you there. A car finance check against the registration does.

Common mix ups between askMID and a history check

• "It is insured, so it cannot be stolen." Insuring a car requires nothing more than a registration and some details. A stolen or cloned car can easily be insured by somebody acting in good faith.
• "askMID will show me a write-off." It will not. Insurers report total losses to the claims and salvage databases used by history checks, which is a completely separate flow of data.
• "No entry means the seller is lying." Trade policies and upload delays both produce blanks. Treat a blank as a question, not a verdict.
• "A history check tells me if it is insured." It does not, ours included. Insurers report policy data to the MID, not to us.

What Carpeep holds, and what it does not

To be explicit: we do not hold insurance status. Nothing in the £15 report tells you whether a car is on a live policy today. If that is your question, askMID is the correct tool and it is free for your own vehicle.

What a car history check does cover is the record of what has happened to the vehicle: outstanding finance, insurance write-off markers, police stolen markers, the mileage recorded at every MOT, the full MOT history with advisories, keeper and ownership history with dates, plate transfers, colour changes, import and export markers, scrapped markers, the VIN identity cross-reference, tax status and the recorded specification.

The four checks that actually protect a buyer

Outstanding finance

The most expensive mistake available to a private buyer. The agreement is registered against the vehicle rather than against the seller, so it travels with the car when the seller disappears.

Write-off markers

Cat S means structural damage was recorded, Cat N means non structural. Those two replaced Cat C and Cat D in October 2017, so older cars can still carry the legacy markers. A properly repaired write-off is not automatically a bad car, but it has to be priced as one. Start with a write-off check.

Police stolen marker

If a car turns out to be recorded as stolen, you will not keep it and you will not get your money back from a seller who has already gone. A stolen car check runs from the registration.

Mileage

Every MOT records the odometer reading, which builds a trail going back years. Clocking shows up as a reading that goes backwards, or a jump that does not fit the pattern around it. A mileage check lays the readings out in order so the gaps are obvious.

Tax status is worth a glance too, and you can see it free on GOV.UK. Tax does not transfer with a sale, so the car needs taxing in your name before you drive it away.