When trying to buy a car apart from the MOT history check you also need to know if the car has been in an accident. Rather than spending £1.50 on a cheap basic check go to autotrader. You may need to sign in. Click on selling then place the registration of the car and mileage. Then go to the next page and on the right side will be the estimate of the price and if the car has been in an accident. All free !
Yes this works to a degree, but a friend has found out that they have a habit of listing cars as cat that are not.
It turns out that Autotrader/AA cars/Motors all use Experian for their checks but NOT HPI.
My friend owned a car from new and tried to list it on Autotrader and it came back Cat C (although it had never been made a claim against). He contacted Autotrader who insisted that he needed to contact Experian. It turns out they had a problem and it was affecting lots of cars that had no history at all on their system (ie never had finance etc). They offered no solution and no rectification method.
So the moral of the sorry is do not trust Autotraders listing totally