Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am not really sure how I can follow all that. I thank Dr. Roux for his presentation. There is nothing in the section on working towards a solution other than fewer crashes and more enforcement. There does not seem to be anything the Central Bank can do to help. I think we all know that if everybody slows down and has fewer claims and if we got rid of fraud, we would have no claims, which would be fantastic but we know people will have crashes and injuries. It does not give me an awful lot of hope. A revised book of quantum is included in the section on solutions. There is quite a bit of talk that the revised book of quantum is purely reflecting what has happened and could lead to an increase in payouts as opposed to anything else. There might be a bit more certainty but the only certainty seems to be that the price is going up. That is what we have seen over the years.

People are looking at this and are clearly very exercised about it. I think this is the last scheduled session. We have had four and a half days of this stuff before this morning. We keep saying it is lack of data. The insurance companies say they give the data to the Central Bank. The Central Bank says it does not collect the data because it is either not allowed to collect them or is not entitled to ask for information it does not need. We would like to see visibility on the 70% of claims that, as far as I can see, are invisible. We do not know what is happening in that sector. We can see what is happening in the courts and we are told that court claims are not increasing. We can see what is happening in the Injuries Board stuff and that is not significantly increasing yet motor insurance premiums have increased by 70%. It is not a loss in investment income; it is a reduction in the amount of investment income earned. Many commentators talk about how they have lost all this money. It is just that they are earning less. We know that but we do not have any visibility. As far as I can see, the Central Bank does not have any visibility regarding the 70% of claims that are being paid out. We asked Insurance Ireland whether it gives everything to the Central Bank. It said "Yes" but then said that it only gives what is asked for. When we then asked it for figures, it basically told us that it does not even compile some of the figures we were hoping to get. There seems to be a significant lack of data available to us and regardless of whether it is the Central Bank's issue or someone else's one, we are not getting it. Many people here might think the Central Bank would be a sensible place for it. It might or might not be.

In his comments on supervisory areas of focus, Mr. Roux referred to slower settlement rates, uneven data management quality and instances where boards exercised less monitoring and oversight than required. That does not inspire a lot of hope in me or, I am sure, other members of the committee that the insurance industry is really serious about tackling the problem. It seems to me that it is quite happy or at least content to just pay out bigger claims and pass on the cost to the consumer and that is what we are seeing. There is the question of whether it is done in a cartel-like fashion. We talked about signalling with the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. Can the Central Bank give consumers and the public any hope that this situation will be improved or is it just a case of "they were too cheap in the past. Get over it."?