First Car Insurance Policy - Any Recommendations?

[Broadsword]

So my younger brother passed his driving test on Monday. The day before we found him a rather excellent 07 Ford Ka with all the critical rust areas recently seen too, a full service history, 55k miles, long MOT, brand new tyres and a new battery. Although it looks plain, it's solid and drives quite amazingly well. Anyway at £750 it had to snapped up. Now we had some fairly ok insurance quotes right up to him passing the test, but they have gone up a bit. The main condition imposed here (by my insisting) is that must not be a telematics policy. Companies are really trying to force people onto these schemes now which is pretty rotten. I had it and it was horrible even though I got money back for good behaviour. It really doesn't make driving safer when you're obsessing about your daily score. Anyway it would rather ruin the prospect of enjoying Ford handling (which I intend to do as a named driver).

 

Anyway, it's several years since I passed my test and things have moved on. I'm wondering if anyone here has any more recent experience in getting a first car insurance policy? Any good brokers people know who don't show up on comparison websites? The car is SORN for the time being while some reasonable deal is figured out. 

[New POD]

We were offered a big brother box, when we wanted to add our 17 year old to my wife's Mini Cooper insurance, but we did our research and found out what a PITA it might turn out to be. Now at 21 years of age she has just taken out her own policy on it with both of us as named driver and for £150 less she could have had the box. Absolutely NO way that is happening. (Wife has moved on to a Juke and gave Mini to daughter as trade in was an insult)

 

The problem with the KA as a first car is that lots of people buy them as first cars. and crash them. Whereas if you got a quote for a jazz, you'd find that a car with twice the power has lower insurance, because nobody ever crashes them.

[Broadsword]

Problem solved... apparently changing the day of the week to start the policy makes a real difference to the cost. A policy tomorrow would cost nearly £1600, on starting it Saturday on the other hand brings it down to nearly £1400. That's without telematics. Bonkers.