Don't know if anyone else was a member of the four4islands organisation; I joined as it offered cheap shooting insurance (which turned out to be cheap for a reason - it was useless!).
However.....
I just logged into my PayPal account and noticed my annual four4islands payment of £20 has just been taken; this reminded me that I hadn't visited their website for ages so off I clicked to have a look - and it is no longer available....
Same for me. I looked in a few weeks ago and the website was ok then.
It's handy to have the insurance to pull out when someone asks even if it is useless.
F4i has been on it's arse since the NRA started doing shotgun matches.
I bought 1000 F4i targets from their shop a year ago and their pricing was so old that they might have lost money in the deal, soon after there was a massive hike in price for the F4i branded red and black targets.
Stopped the direct debit on my insurance as it was going straight into someone's paypal account and F4i weren't getting it, whether I was insured for that period remains a mystery.
We were alerted to this thread by one of our members enquiring whether we were still operating and was the insurance still valid. And the answer is yes, very much so: Four4islands is still running and the insurance is valid and as competitive as ever.
This post is to confirm that fact and also to correct some damaging and inaccurate comment here.
We had an unplanned outage that commenced on 3 March this year that was not reported to us, but was fixed quickly when discovered. We were down for a few days which will have been the cause of the rumour.
Insurance
For your reassurance the insurance is not ‘cheap – because it’s useless’ as it is provides the same cover from policies provided to NRA, UKPSA and BASC members. It is cheap because we knew that we could provide an equivalent service for shooters at £20 rather than the £70 to £80 membership fee elsewhere. Our priority when we launched the service was to provide the core legal requirement for public liability injury or property damage plus personal accident cover and this it does adequately.
As with all insurance policies there are priced options and we had to make a judgement-call on what was essential and affordable. We knew of no instances in our collective experience of FAC revocations or renewal disputes and so legal cover for these was not provided.
We have every sympathy with the original poster here and indeed advised him on potential solutions. With the hindsight of the development of medical assessment for FAC revocations and renewals we will look to add this level of cover.
Subscriptions
Take up on launch was rapid and in the first week, twenty or so club members' subscriptions did go to an organiser’s PayPal account but all funds were transferred to F4i and we e-mailed that group in 2015 ahead of their renewals asking them to cancel the original subscription and subscribe again if required. The poster who said his ‘direct debit’ wasn’t going to F4i is not correct and he was indeed covered for any period paid.
Where now?
The NRA’s Shotgun League launch lead to the demise of our matches, but we continue as a website, forum, club and insurance provider with no foreseeable plans to close. The forum has little activity now as people have moved to other platforms such as Facebook; a backwards step in my opinion.
Those matches did indeed become the NRA Shotgun League as F4i was the proof-of-concept (and safety) that convinced the NRA to allow movement with a loaded firearm. The closure of Shield has since lost three or four matches a year from that circuit.
I trust that this clarifies the position and corrects misleading comment.
While I'm glad the insurance offer is now clarified, at the time of my original post the insurance .pdf on the four4islands site showed legal expenses was included: http://four4islands.org/wp-content/uplo ... eaflet.pdf
"Legal expenses cover arising from suspension, revocation, curtailment, amendment or refusal to renew a member’s UK firearm or shotgun certificate under current legislation,excluding application for initial grant of such a certificate." £50k cover.
I found out the hard way that it wasn't.....when I tried to claim on it.....
