Mr. Neil McDonnell:

Notwithstanding the movement on some awards that we have seen - we are not contradicting that - the issue here is that motor insurance is a volume play. Drivers who tax their cars online will see approximately 100 companies offering motor insurance here. A small business with a play centre or an adventure centre which is renting bikes will potentially be down to one insurance supplier. On Monday, I went through an insurance policy with one of our members who is in a sporting business. The terms and conditions being applied by the one remaining insurer to his business are extremely burdensome. This is his only means to stay alive as a business. He is basically operating on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

Our duty of care is effectively strict. If something happens on business premises, essentially our system of law does not care about the degree of care taken by the plaintiff. If it happened on a business's premises, the owner is goosed; it is deemed to be the owner's fault and they will pay.

Despite what we understood would happen under the Judicial Council Act, we have seen some very impactful decisions where the judicial guidelines were not even referenced. We have had one or two awards which not alone were higher than the judicial guidelines but were higher than the old book of quantum without any justification. We have written to the Minister on that to ask what contingency plans the Department of Justice is making if the direction we have taken proves to be the wrong direction, as we have said for more than two years.

The Deputy asked about self-insurance. Self-insurance is not a solution to the cost of insurance. Self-insurance or mutual insurance is potentially a way around the take-it-or-leave it, gun-to-the-head insurance available from British companies at the moment. A mutual or self-insurance contract will typically be more expensive in the first three years because the mutual insurer needs to build up adequate reserves. It is not the answer that some people think it will be.