Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Dual pricing has been written about by the likes of Charlie Weston for many years.

I have a had a serious number of engagements with the Central Bank in the past year in written correspondence, a private meeting with the Governor and a submission of the major report. The two key findings in that report were that dual pricing was widespread and that the tables show the longer a customer is with the company the more he or she is penalised. Page 12 in my report looks at what the Central Bank has done. They nearly coalesce. It is in the same ballpark. After nine years or more the premiums charged are 30% higher. After the first year and into the second and third years, it is approximately 10% higher. We talk of this as the loyalty premium.

I have asked for dual pricing to be banned for more than a year. I asked the Central Bank to carry out an investigation, which it agreed to do, on receipt of my report. The Central Bank has confirmed everything in my initial claim. In Trump's America, dual pricing is banned in 20 states. In Britain, it will probably be banned in the second quarter of next year. In fact, it is not probably; they are going to ban it. The Financial Conduct Authority, FCA, in the UK has made it clear that it will ban dual pricing. Yet, the Government here is not willing to make a policy decision that this practice will end. Let us be clear about what this means. The Central Bank's report conclusions are, as we can extrapolate, that some 2.5 million policy holders in the State were charged annually €187 million more than it costs to insure those policies. In Britain, where they have done far more research on this, they estimate that the banning of dual pricing would benefit the consumers there by between €4 billion and €12 billion. The FCA says that average prices would decrease by between 10% and 15% for consumers and that it would encourage competition in the market. Why is the Government delaying on this issue?