North of England repairers have made a clean sweep of the top three prizes in the annual bodyshop ‘oscars’ run by accident management specialist WNS Assistance.

The gold award went to the Stoneacre Group, based in Doncaster, with silver going to Perfect Finish of Bolton and bronze to Benfield Accident Repair Centre of Newcastle.

Paul Zenon, magician, comedian and TV personality, presented the awards at a ceremony held at Birmingham NEC’s Crowne Plaza.

The top 40 ‘gold standard’ bodyshops from within WNS’s national network of repairers were invited to the ceremony, each receiving a ‘premier gold repairer’ award, with the top three also receiving individual trophies.

The awards are intended to draw attention to WNS’s development of an internal standard for its repairers that rewards quality of service with increased throughput. This divides bodyshops according to a gold, silver, and bronze Standard.

The programme measures several elements of each repair such as average downtime, overall repair life cycles and customer satisfaction.