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Worrying reports have been coming in to the Bankstone News Newsdesk of insurers being beaten up by governments and regulators. These brutal and gratuitous attacks seem all the more disturbing when you reflect that all insurers have ever wanted to do is make people happy, a joy-bringing mission on which, ironically, according to Consumer Intelligence chief Ian Huge, they have recently been achieving an exceptional level of success (see below)!

Is there no justice? No gratitude? No single tiny shred of common decency left to edify this vicious world? Apparently not.

“Motor insurers are making consumers happy” reports Insurance Tights this week, as it exclusively showcases definitive new NIPS statistics produced by Mr Huge’s Consumer Intelligence Company. So why on earth would governments and regulators attack the very people to whom consumers up and down the land owe their current high spirits? How can that make sense? Luckily, Huge has some practical suggestions on how motor insurers can stop themselves getting beaten up.

Insurers, he urges, “should be really rattling the cages” (They’re in cages, for Goodness’ sake!); they should be saying something like ““Look, stop beating us up, we are actually doing a great job.” There are plenty of other people out there causing far more consumer harm and distress than insurers, Huge confirms, and he has the NIPS stats to prove it.

And, what’s more, motor insurers’ happiness inducing powers are building strongly right now. They scored a mighty 6.3 NIPS in 2015 compared with a relatively modest 3.4 NIPS the year before. Huge says insurance customers are already spending less time shopping around and their “satisfaction is going up.” So, come on, Government, give motor insurers some credit and stop beating them up or trying to shoot then or whatever.

Wasn’t it, after all, the same Prime Minister Dave “Big Society” Cameron who spent all that time early doors banging on about how he wanted to make everyone happy? So stop the beating, Dave and give this beleaguered industry a break!

Consumers are quite happy enough already, Huge argues, going on to suggest that perhaps industry bodies like “Biba, the ABI or CII” could do something about getting the industry “out of the cross hairs of the government and the regulators”.

How about it, Bodies?