If you are a new driver on the road and find yourself both annoyed and perplexed at the insurance costs you are expected to pay just because you are a new driver and (probably) young, then you are not alone. After a few phone calls to the more well known insurance companies, you have inevitably found yourself getting more and more anxious as you try and budget an exorbitant amount for premiums every month. What makes it frustrating is that you HAVE to pay for insurance – it's the law. And it may seem that insurance companies are just taking advantage of this.

While the insurance companies should by no means go unchallenged with regards to their prices, there are also certain responsibilities for the prices that the consumer must carry.

Firstly, research shows that one in five new drivers end up having an accident in their first year of driving, and a shocking 40 percent of new drivers don't check the first vehicle they have bought – assuming that it is roadworthy and reliable, only to find it the cause of an accident.

Added to this, many are driving on the UK roads without insurance, and this is costing the UK insurance industry so much that they are hiking up prices £25 - £30 a year. Currently, research is showing that for every 20 drivers on the road, one is uninsured, which means that insurance prices will continue to rise.

Secondly, in any market with high prices the consumer often has themselves to blame for not forcing competition in the market. Insurance companies know that most consumers are fairly apathetic, just paying the bills month after month and complaining only to themselves about how high their insurance has risen since they started paying.

What is strange about rising insurance costs is that your car lowers in value every year – meaning that you should, for all good reason, see a drop in price every year but because your original price was fixed, insurance companies simply add inflation costs onto this price with no consideration to your car's value. What this means is that if you phoned your current insurance company and received a new quote, based on the current value of your car, you would probably pay lower than you are paying now. Furthermore, if you phoned another insurance company you would probably get an even lower price because the insurance company wants to garner your business. By moving your insurance company you force insurance companies to get competitive.

You also force this scenario when you shop around for insurance and don't just accept the first few quotes you get. For this, you can use the internet to your advantage in a big way, finding small insurance companies that are reputable but much more affordable. For young people looking for cheap car insurance, or new drivers looking for cheap car insurance, shopping around – although time consuming – has tremendous benefits in the end, and helps to make the market better.

Shopping around can be done much easier these days through the internet and price comparison shopping websites in particular. Any search for these on an internet search engine will produce a great number of results.