Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming before the committee. I want to drill down to this issue of data. It seems there is not perfect knowledge in terms of how the industry operates. We do not have perfect knowledge except through the reports we have from the PIAB. Its submission to the committee gave the average award from 2009-15, which was approximately €23,000. The PIAB submission stated there is:

...no public information available relating to overall numbers and costs of claims for personal injuries and the only figures that were made public did not contain any information on the costs of directly settled cases. Without access to that information, a full picture of the impact on insurance premiums is difficult to establish...

The Irish Brokers Association, IBA, submission states the same thing. I am trying to grapple with the issue. Insurance Ireland through its public utterances in the past 48 hours or so has been quoting from "independent data sources", from the Injuries Board figures, from the bodily injuries review published by the Central Bank and from the OECD report which states that Ireland is the eighth most expensive country in which to enforce a contract, given the average award of a Circuit Court increased by 21.2% in 2015, following a 13.5% increase in 2014. The point I am getting at is that I do understand why Insurance Ireland is not sharing data. First, I am making an assertion that is it not, so the witnesses can correct me if I am wrong and I would like to get the IBA position on that. If we had perfect knowledge in regard to all of the claims, we would be able to drill down to the reason people's premiums have gone up by 70% to 80% or why some people are not being insured at all. To give an example I have used before, if a premium goes from €500 on a Thursday to a cost of €800, which is a surcharge of €300, what percentage of that €300 is what I call super-normal profit and what percentage is attributable to the cost of the historical decrease in insurance and the provisioning that is necessary? The witnesses should correct me if my analysis of the situation is wrong.

I am directing my questions in the first instance specifically to the IBA. The second element I need an answer on is in regard to Zenith. There seems to be a contradictory position between what Insurance Ireland is saying and what Zenith is saying. If I understand Mr. Humphreys correctly - he is on the public record so I have no issue about naming him here - he is saying Zenith is exiting the market because it does not have access to proper data. If so, I would like to have an assessment or a view from the IBA as to why that is the case or what its take is on that.

I was very taken by a point in the IBA submission, which states: "All gardaí should have APNR equipment so they can scan registrations to see if they are insured, and the requirement for insurance discs should be abolished." If we think about that logically, the driver gets the insurance disc in the post and slots it into the pouch on the window, and the technology now exists to scan or copy it in order to create a false disc. If we are depending on a garda at a checkpoint with hundreds of vehicles passing through to intimately examine the disc, there is a case to be made for the APNR model so this can be based on checking of registrations, and we can look at the enforcement procedures thereafter.

What this committee is trying to do is to drill down into what it is that we need to recommend by way of solutions. I will come back to Ms Dowling in the second part of the meeting as she suggests there is a potential legislative solution to this. Those are my opening remarks and I will come back in again later, if I may.