Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming into us today. There has been a focus on data. I am looking at this from the point of view of whether the market is competitive. Whether it is perfectly competitive or not remains to be seen. There is still a fundamental question about whether there is perfect knowledge around the market. We all recognise there has to be a surplus on every premium derived by a company. That is a given but we are finding it difficult to reconcile the extent to which premia have increased. It is a steep, unaffordable rise. If insurance companies are pricing risk and liability and if by any reasonable, objective analysis the individual motorist's personal circumstances have not changed, the car has passed its NCT test and nothing has changed from the motorist's point of view yet they are incurring a cost of 30%, 40% or 50% they are asking themselves, "What is going on here?". Most people will accept the argument around the resetting of the market to adhere to rules and provisioning. The witnesses' opening statement outlined that the price of premiums had reduced significantly over quite a number of years. What most people cannot reconcile is the extent of the increases. I have listened carefully to what Mr. Horan is saying about the data. He speaks about the private motor insurance statistics report in 2015, the IIDS, the ANPR and so on. In the Personal Injuries Assessment Board's submission to us it states 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 [of personal injury claims] on insurance premiums is difficult to establish.

If we take Insurance Ireland's submission before us today and its willingness to seek a solution to this issue and layer on the fact that it is saying there is adequate data available to make an assessment of the market, why is it that the PIAB, which is a statutory body, is telling the Houses of the Oireachtas there is not perfect knowledge?

How do the witnesses reconcile this statement?