Performance Direct Motorbike Insurance Review

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Grove & Dean has been broking insurance from the same corner of Essex since it was incorporated on 17 April 1974, and it opened Performance Direct in 1995 as the general insurance side of the business. The group now employs more than a hundred and fifty people out of 7 Station Lane, Hornchurch, and holds Chartered Insurance Broker status, which the firm points out only around 5% of UK broking firms hold. It has been a member of the British Insurance Brokers' Association since 2007. Every policy is sold by Grove & Dean Ltd, company 1167043, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under firm reference 307002.

For bikes the offer is breadth rather than a single own-brand product. Performance Direct says it searches up to 100 motorcycle schemes from UK underwriters through one quote form, across comprehensive, third party fire and theft and third party only. Legal expenses are included, foreign use runs to 90 days, club membership and multi-bike discounts are applied where they apply, and agreed value is offered as an option on classic machines. Up to five motorcycles can be quoted online in one sitting; a sixth means ringing 01708 609 331, which is answered from 8:30am to 6:30pm on weekdays and 9am to 5pm on Saturdays, with a 24-hour claims line behind it.

The shape of the business shows in the scheme list. The motorcycle section alone names cover for classics, monkey bikes, sports bikes, tourers, customs, adventure sports machines, sports tourers, trials and enduro bikes, and naked and muscle bikes, on top of scooters and multi-bike. These are the machines a price comparison form tends to choke on, and a broker with a hundred schemes behind it is a reasonable answer to that problem.

The Chartered badge, and what a firm has to do to keep it

Plenty of brokers describe themselves as specialists. Chartered Insurance Broker is one of the few claims on a broker's homepage that somebody outside the firm actually audits, and the Chartered Insurance Institute publishes the test. At least one member of the board must personally hold the Chartered Insurer, Chartered Insurance Broker or Chartered Insurance Underwriting Agent title. The whole board, plus 90% of customer-facing staff, must be CII members. The firm needs three years of trading as an authorised and regulated business before it can even apply, and it must have a core values and business practices statement, a diversity and inclusion policy aligned to the CII Code of Ethics, and a professional development programme.

On top of those fixed conditions sits a scorecard. A firm must reach at least 50 points, earned from board members holding Chartered titles (25 to 50 points), board members with the CII Diploma (10 to 15), customer-facing staff with Chartered titles (10 to 30), staff with the Diploma (10 to 30) or the Certificate (5 to 15), and 5 points for supporting credentials such as Investors in People or an ISO certification. The title is renewed annually and paid for: £500 for a firm of up to 10 employees, £1,000 for 11 to 50, £1,500 for 51 to 250 and £2,000 above that. On its own headcount of more than 150, Performance Direct sits in the £1,500 band.

None of that says anything about the price a rider will be quoted. What it does say is that the people answering the phone are qualified to a published standard, and that the firm has agreed to be measured against an ethics code it did not write. On a product where the whole value of using a broker is that somebody understands what a Tuono is and why a 1993 Fireblade is not worth its book value, that is not nothing.

Behind the panel, somebody still carries the risk

Performance Direct does not insure motorcycles. It arranges cover from insurers and underwriting agencies, and which one a rider lands on depends entirely on what comes back from the quote. The panel is not published, so there is no way to know in advance whose name will be on the certificate. The one motorcycle document in the firm's own library is a KGM Motor Insurance motorcycle policy summary marked as updated in December 2015.

KGM is worth understanding because it is a name that recurs across specialist bike broking. It is a trading name of DUAL Corporate Risks Limited, company 4160680, FCA firm reference 312593, and its motor capacity is provided by Zurich with a primary line of £130 million. KGM's own motorcycle wording, reference MC24 and dated June 2010, gives third party property damage cover of £20,000,000 for any one claim or series of claims arising from one incident, with a further £5,000,000 for associated costs and expenses. Set that against the legal floor and the number starts to mean something: the Road Traffic Act minimum for third party property damage is £1,200,000, so the policy carries roughly sixteen times the compulsory limit.

The same wording is where the small print lives. If the schedule states no compulsory excess, the rider pays the first £150 of any claim, with any voluntary excess stacked on top. Territorial limits are England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, and foreign use is allowed provided the trip is temporary and does not exceed 90 days in any one period of insurance. Unattended, the bike must have its steering lock applied where one is fitted and the keys removed. KGM's current product page also lists replacement locks and keys up to £300 per incident and a new-for-old replacement trigger at 60% damage, and sets eligibility at riders over 30 with a full UK licence held more than 12 months and three years of UK residency.

Two things follow for anyone reading this before they quote. The KGM figures above come from KGM's own paperwork and describe a KGM policy, not a Performance Direct one, and the wording dates from 2010 — a rider offered KGM terms today should ask for the current version. And because the panel runs to a hundred schemes, another rider on the same day may be offered something with different limits entirely.

Declare the exhaust, because the law has already decided what happens if you do not

Specialist bike broking exists largely because of modifications, and modifications are where these policies most often fall apart. Performance Direct will insure a modified machine — its own guidance says alterations including engine upgrades and suspension changes can be covered provided they are declared in full — and its custom bike page goes further, promising cover "no matter what modifications have been applied". The condition attached to that is the important part, and it is not the broker's condition. It is statute.

The Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 replaced the old duty to volunteer information with a duty to take reasonable care not to make a misrepresentation when answering an insurer's questions. Where an answer is wrong and it made a difference, the Act calls it a qualifying misrepresentation and sorts the remedy by the rider's state of mind. If it was deliberate or reckless, Schedule 1 lets the insurer "avoid the contract and refuse all claims, and need not return any of the premiums paid". If it was merely careless and the insurer would never have written the risk, it may still "avoid the contract and refuse all claims, but must return the premiums paid".

The third outcome is the one riders rarely see coming. Where a careless answer would only have produced a higher premium, the insurer keeps the policy alive and cuts the payout instead: it "need pay on the claim only X% of what it would otherwise have been under an obligation to pay", where X is the premium actually charged as a proportion of the premium that should have been charged. A rider who paid £400 for cover that should have cost £800 because of an undeclared remap does not get nothing. They get half of a £9,000 write-off, and the arithmetic is done by the insurer.

The Financial Ombudsman Service has published its own view of where the line sits, and it is more useful than most policy wordings. It defines a modification as a change that is not part of the manufacturer's standard specification, naming exhaust upgrades, alloy wheels, tinted windows and ECU remapping, and warns that an insurer may argue the modification made the vehicle more attractive to thieves as well as faster. Its published cases cut both ways: a changed air filter was held not to be a modification because it had a negligible effect on performance, and a set of oversized alloys went the customer's way because an average owner would not have spotted the difference, while an undeclared remap and exhaust work were both found to be fair grounds for voiding a policy. Rachel Lam, the Ombudsman's Insurance Director, puts the stakes plainly: these changes can leave owners "thousands of pounds worse off". The Ombudsman's own summary of its approach is blunter still — if a significant modification was not declared, it is unlikely to uphold the complaint.

The practical reading is that a broker able to place a modified bike is worth using, and worth being exhaustive with. Every aftermarket part, including anything fitted by a previous owner, belongs on the proposal.

Five bikes, one no claims discount, one renewal date

Multi-bike is the most concrete saving on offer here. Performance Direct will quote up to five motorcycles online under a single policy and says it can insure as many as an owner holds if the sixth and beyond are arranged over the phone. The no claims discount is shared across every machine on the policy rather than being built up separately on each, which matters to anyone who has bought a second bike and watched it start from nothing.

The firm is straightforward about how the pricing tends to work: many of its insurers base the premium on the highest-valued motorcycle and add the rest at a discount. Each bike is still listed individually, and bikes of very different values may attract different terms or different excesses within the same policy. Club membership discounts stack on where the rider belongs to an owners' club the scheme recognises, and legal cover is described as free on the multi-bike product.

What is not published is the size of any of those discounts. There is no percentage attached to the multi-bike saving, none attached to the club discount and no list of which clubs qualify, so the only way to find out what any of it is worth is to run the quote. That is normal for a broker whose prices come from a hundred different schemes, but it does mean the headline benefits cannot be compared against anyone else's on paper.

Where the lock condition in your policy actually comes from

Almost every bike policy carries a security condition, and almost none of them explain who sets the standard. The answer is usually Sold Secure, which tests locks, chains and ground anchors and grades them Bronze, Silver, Gold or Diamond. Bronze is described as a good level of resistance against the opportunist thief in a normal risk environment; Silver a greater level against the more determined thief; Gold a very good level against the dedicated thief in a high-risk environment; and Diamond the top level of resistance against the most determined thief. Each grade is tested with a different tool list, running from a basic list at Bronze to a specialist dedicated list at Diamond.

Sold Secure itself notes that many insurance companies require a rated lock and that providers will often specify the grade they want, which is why the grade on the box is worth checking against the schedule before buying either. On a Performance Direct policy the requirement will come from whichever scheme the quote lands on rather than from the broker, so it is a question to ask at the point of sale rather than after a theft. The KGM wording quoted above sets a lower bar again — steering lock applied, keys removed — but a condition that mild is not typical of the sports and custom end of the market.

The risk the premium is priced against

Bike premiums look punitive next to car premiums until the casualty figures are put beside them. The Department for Transport's motorcyclist factsheet for 2025, published on 30 July 2026, records 386 motorcyclist deaths and 5,710 seriously injured over the year. Averaged across 2021 to 2025 that is 7 motorcyclists killed and 104 seriously injured every week.

Measured against distance the picture is starker and improving at the same time. Motorcycles covered 3.02 billion vehicle miles in 2025, at a fatality rate of 128 per billion vehicle miles. That rate was 186 in 2004, a fall of 31%, and deaths themselves are down 34% from 585 over the same period. Two details in the factsheet are worth carrying into a quote form: 70% of motorcycle fatalities happen on rural roads, which carry only 38% of motorcycle traffic, and 92% of killed or seriously injured motorcyclists between 2021 and 2025 were male. A rider whose annual mileage is mostly rural weekend riding is in a different risk pool from one commuting through a city, and the honest answer on the proposal form is the one that keeps the policy intact.

What the website will not tell you before you pick up the phone

The gap in this operation is documentary. Performance Direct publishes no terms of business agreement, no schedule of fees and no insurance product information document anywhere a shopper can read before quoting. Its cancellation page tells the customer to "check your policy wording and our terms and conditions as these documents will outline the charges involved when cancelling" — but the terms and conditions it points at are not on the site. So the administration fee, the mid-term adjustment charge, the cancellation charge and the cost of paying monthly are all unknown until a quote has been run, on a product where broker fees at the specialist end of the bike market routinely reach three figures.

The only motorcycle policy document in the firm's own library is that KGM policy summary updated in December 2015, sitting in a directory the site asks search engines not to index. That configuration is ordinary and a browser opens the file without trouble, so it is no reflection on the firm — but one summary from 2015 is thin for a broker advertising a hundred schemes.

A couple of the marketing numbers also want a light touch. The site describes a "40-year history" as a family company, while Companies House puts incorporation at 17 April 1974, which is 52 years — the claim appears to have been written once and never revisited. And no Defaqto or Which? rating for this product could be found; the review score the firm displays on its own pages is collected by the firm, not awarded by a ratings agency, so it is no substitute. Complaints handling is clearly set out, at least: three working days for a simple case, eight weeks for anything requiring investigation, a written Final Response, then the Financial Ombudsman Service at Exchange Tower, London E14 9SR on 0800 023 4567.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 2 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.