Motor insurance premiums fall 5%, report says

Vivienne Clarke

The price of motor insurance has continued to fall with premiums costing 5 per cent less in the first half of 2022 compared with 2021 prices, according to a new report from the Central Bank of Ireland.

At €578, the average cost of a motor insurance policy is €135 less than it was in 2017, the report states.

According to the bank’s mid-year Private Motor Insurance Report, in the first six months of 2022 there were 67,000 motor insurance claims made, of which 94 per cent were for damage and just 6 per cent for injuries.

The total cost to settle all these claims came to €278 million – 55 per cent of which related to injury claims and 45 per cent related to damage claims.

Peter Boland, director of the Alliance for Insurance Reform, said the cost of insurance was not falling fast enough.

He told RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne there were “massive reductions” in the number of claims (down 42 per cent), yet the amount being passed on to motorists was only 5 per cent. “That’s nowhere near enough,” he said.

The insurance companies have had to be “dragged” into the reform process and they were not passing on all the benefits, he said.

The excuse that “historic” cases were still “washing” through the court system was not good enough, he said, as the cases before the courts had already been included in policies. “Future risk” was dramatically lower now than three years ago, he added.

Mr Boland said the insurance situation now was the result of years of low levels of competition. The stalwarts of the market had done very well in Ireland and threats that insurers would leave the country did not hold up to scrutiny.