Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests and thank them for their presentations. Our job is to conduct pre-legislative scrutiny on the general scheme. Correct me if I am wrong, but I did not hear any specific recommendations from anyone on changes to the proposed Bill that we ought to be considering. I ask our guests to indicate what changes they think we should consider.

The bigger issue that concerns us all is that the significant changes that have come through legislation do not seem to be reflected in insurance premiums yet. What is so different about motor insurance in comparison with the other types? Motor insurance, according to CSO data, is down by 37% since 2016 and by 12% in the past 12 months alone. We are definitely getting traction in the motor sector from the changes that are coming through. What makes employers' liability and public liability so dramatically different? While I accept there is difficulty in comparing and getting a standard case, do the insurance industry, the Central Bank, the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council, NCPC, or any other body have an index of what is happening that is broadly accepted? We have the industry stating that there is no change in premiums and businesses indicating that they are up by 15%.

They cannot both be right. I thought a lot of the effort of the Central Bank and the National Competitiveness Council was to move to some sort of a baseline but we seem to be still arguing about the numbers, and then the defence is always anecdotal, such as a business that has had an awful experience or a court case in which a judge charged three times the award. That does not help public policy. Can we find common ground where we could at least discuss this with shared statistics that everyone agrees with, rather than the anecdotal stuff that makes it difficult for us to disentangle what needs to be done?