Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It has issued its second report which stated that the reason prices are going up at renewal is because of dual pricing. It has stated that home insurance will go up by 35% and motor insurance by 25%. These companies, which have a legal responsibility under the consumer protection code to act fairly, honestly and with integrity with their consumers, have basically lied to the Government and their consumers, as well as having false documents on their website, because they are hiding the fact that dual pricing is an issue. I made a major complaint, as well as a submission of 130 pages, to the Central Bank on dual pricing over a year ago. Page 12 outlined exactly what the Central Bank found, which is that the longer one is with an insurance company, the more one will be fleeced by it. The graph is the same as that in this report.

What is the Minister of State going to do now that the insurance companies have lied to the Government and to their consumers in not acknowledging that dual pricing, price-walking or price optimisation - whatever one wants to call it - is a factor in premiums being pushed up? What is he going to do about the fact that they have breached the consumer protection code? Is he going to challenge them?

In 2015, the then Governor of the Central Bank, Patrick Honohan, wrote to the then Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, stating that representatives of regulated entities, insurance companies, were providing deliberately false information to the Central Bank but it had no remedy to deal with this issue because there was a lacuna in the legislation. I have challenged Governments upside down, inside out and produced legislation to close that gap. Insurance companies are able to do what they are doing because the Government has not closed the gap to allow for somebody who deliberately provides false information to the Central Bank to be penalised or held to account.