Mr. Conor Faughnan:

There are people in the industry who do not like me because of some of the things I say. In this regard, one must consider where the insurance companies are incentivised. They are acutely incentivised to understand how much fraud costs and they are certainly incentivised to ensure they are not more exposed than their competitors. However, provided they can put a number on it and charge the punter, they are not incentivised to fix the problem.

If one understands the problem very deeply, but one's potential competitor from overseas has not got a clue, then one is still less incentivised to fix it. I would take the view that the industry is not being cynical, it is just following its self-interest, but it is acutely aware of how to cost this. For reasons of genuine citizenship and frustration with the whole thing, it does share many of our broad concerns and would like to see it fixed if handed a wand, but it is not actually incentivised to fix it. That may be part of the problem.

The other issue, which may or may not be heretical, in the context of using age as a weighting factor, the AA took the view that the gender directive as regards motor insurance was a mistake. It has probably been one of the factors pushing up prices overall. Sometimes in this country the words "equality" and "fairness" get used as if they mean the same thing. They do not mean the same thing and are often mutually incompatible. Insisting that there is no such thing as gender is actually unfair to females, particularly young females, because the long-term consequence of it is the systematic overcharging of young females to fund the systematic undercharging of young males. While both groups are going up to an unacceptable extent, gender bakes in an unfairness.