The ABI’s DG Ins-Po, Jimmy Dalton, clearly knows a thing or too about motors and how to get them running.
It was to a engineering metaphor he instinctively turned this week to voice concerns about the government’s failure to follow up on efforts to reform the UK’s notoriously dysfunctional motor insurance market. The whole process, he laments, appears to have stalled. And that can mean one only thing, he recognises without hesitation: those efforts need a kick start.
In the three years since insurers first cornered PM Davey C and told him to crack down on things like whiplash, claims, and claimant lawyers, insurers have been bending over backwards to pass on reform-fuelled cost savings to their policyholders. Net result: everyone’s paying less for their motor insurance.
Everyone, that is, apart from young people. And why aren’t they enjoying the same 10% and upwards savings as everyone else? Simple, because HMG’s efforts to stop them tearing around like maniacs (ten to a car, crazed with childish overconfidence, summarily meting out random automotive mayhem upon all in their paths) have, not to put to fine a point on it, stalled.
Doolin’ Dalton is not the kind of man to let officialdom off the hook when balls are being dropped on youth drivers. What we need, he claimed this week, is graduated driving licences, which, he says, will cut both car-related carnage and insurance premiums at a single stroke.
What’s not to like about that, any right minded person would surely ask rhetorically.
Plus also: HMG needs to get on with upping the Small Claims Trap limit from £1k to £5k, a process which currently appears to have ‘stalled’ (and hence, clearly, needs kick startage) and perhaps some more cracking down on claims and those who, to quote that sinister euphemism, “manage” them. Basically, Government, pull your bloomin’ finger out and stop stalling around, says Jim.
Is government listening, or have they got bored of trying to fix the broken motor market? Only time will tell. But it’s going to be hard for them to come out publicly and say they don’t care about issues as important as young drivers flirting with their own (and other road users’) accelerated mortality, and/or having to pay high insurance premiums, etc.
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