The Alliance for Insurance Reform has welcomed the Government’s ‘Action Plan for Insurance Reform’ published by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Recovery and Investment’s Sub-Group on Insurance Reform, while expressing concern at the timelines involved.

Commenting on the release of the plan, Eoin McCambridge, managing director of McCambridge’s of Galway and director of the Alliance said, “As a declaration of intent, this plan ticks all the boxes. But progress on real insurance reform has happened at a snail’s pace and the majority of the proposals in the Action Plan have been doing the rounds since the start of 2017. That is 4 years of unsustainably high insurance premiums closing down businesses and stopping voluntary groups from doing what they volunteered to do. We call on the Government to not treat the timelines in this plan as targets to be aimed for. Rather we urge them to speed up the pace of reforms to beat these timelines and allow businesses and society in general to reopen after Covid19 without insurance costs hanging over their heads.”

A summary of the main proposed actions and timelines in the plan includes:

Report on the implementation and early impact of the new personal injury guidelines to be adopted in July 2021 by the Judicial Council– December 2021.

Ensuring that fraudulent claims are forwarded to the DPP – December 2021.

Implementation of recommendations regarding the publishing of insurance fraud data – December 2021.

Central Bank supervision of the insurance industry’s response to business interruption claims by SMEs – ‘Ongoing’ – no deadline.

Legislative proposals on reform of the role of PIAB – June 2021.

Publication of Central Bank data on liability insurance – June 2021.

Peter Boland, director of the Alliance said, “In the last 4 years we have had the Oireachtas Finance Committee Report on Insurance Costs, two Cost of Insurance Working Group (CIWG) reports and 11 CIWG Updates; and the reports of the Personal Injuries Commission. Many of the meaningful actions in these reports experienced slippage or did not happen at all and the reality is that no reform that has happened so far has applied downward pressure on insurance costs. The actions in this report must not be allowed to be dragged out in the same way.”