The European Court of Justice has ruled that Insurers can no longer discriminate on grounds of gender: It is thought that age discrimination will be the next in the firing line.
This is going to impact on car insurance premiums for women, who will pay highter premiums and also the cost of pensions annuities, resulting in lower pension income for men.
Surely Insurance is based on risk factors and insurers should be able to take gender into account when assessing those risks, if one gender is proven to be a higher risk?
Being the cynic ( realist ) I am, there is no way that any premiums will be reduced as a result of this ruling.
You can blame it all on the TORIES, they took us into the EU and we have suffered ever since.
It used to be "buy British" "fly the Flag" now its sorry folks.
Its time we left them to it, and looked after our own little island.
Since maggie sold everything that we had to her "MATES" at knock down prices, we now produce bugger all for britain and everything for the rest rest of the world.
So as long as we remain EUROPEANS we have to abide by the rule of the EC.
Surely if we can kick out giving votes to prisonors then surely we can kick out this ruling that effects our insurance and not europes?
when are we going to learn that being part of europe does not meen europe dictating to us on what seams a daily basis.
our daughter will suffer from this ruling next year. it is obvious that young men ARE more a risk than young women anyone can see that so should pay more on there insurance, it is a shame that the people who make these rulings have blinkers on.
Women have more accidents per mile than men.....the figures are skewed by the fact that less women drive and those that do tend to cover fewer miles....women are NOT safer drivers than men
sorry i thought this had some meening?
also we found this from a leading expert it seams.
“MPs have voted overwhelmingly in favour of maintaining a blanket ban preventing prisoners from voting, strengthening the government's hand as it seeks to water down a ruling from the European court of human rights.
Ministers will start drawing up a compromise proposal after MPs voted by 234 to 22, a majority of 212, in favour of a cross-party motion that said parliament should decide on such an important issue.”
So not a vote ruling it out but one that says Parliament and not Strasbourg should decide
“The non-binding vote …................"Although the vote is not legally binding on the government, "
Heavily edited obviously but nevertheless.......
This is the link to the abstract of the original published article.
Interestingly similar studies are available showing that older drivers are more dangerous than younger.
Thats statistics for ya eh.
The reason insurance companies differentiate (or pre-judge if you prefer) by gender and age for car insurance is because it is a cheap and effective way to identify higher risks. That doesn't make it right because the risk has nothing to do with gender or age and everything to do with driving behaviours such as number of miles and time of day. So I am wholly in favour of a less broad brush approach to risk assesment for car insurance. It will be interesting to see how the insurers take the real factors into account in future. They may well decide that its less costly not to bother or ask for assurances regarding annual mileage and time of use. There have already been cheaper insurance deals for instance for young people prepared to avoid driving after 10pm, regulated using an in car box of tricks. I can foresee a major shake up that will ultimately lead to a fairer distribution of what after all is simply a shared cost that only exists because our society is over reliant on personal transport.
I am pretty sure that the mortality and morbidity risks used for life health and pensions are based on more robust data. Changing that aspect seems a bit bonkers to me.
I blame the Torries for taking us in though at the time it was a good idea.
I blame the Labour party and the Tory party for keeping us in.
I blame the Labour party and the Tory party for allowing the EU to increase our financial input to the EU more than other equally sized or larger population Countries.
I also blame them for allowing the EU to impose all that they do without fighting our case, Margaret Thatcher (not everything she did was bad) didn't stand for it and when she was in power Europe listened and for the most part made the correct concessions.
That said I agree with this in part, if we allow blanket discount on gender it is wrong, based on the number of miles driven by men and by women and based on the number of insured men and insured women it has been proven that the accident figures are not actually disimilar.
Age on the other hand has a very large bearing on the number of accidents by both men and women, experience does make a difference.
where are these two when you need them to help us understand sex discrimination laws
:thumbup:
No need for Actuaries anymore then?
For fear of polarising the world insurance companies will be unable to insure according to risk? This goes against the very basis of how insurance came to be - civilised bookmakers. If we carry on down this line then bookmakers will not be able to create odds on any kind of human competion as it would appear to represent discrimination of one sort or another.
This has to be the most ridiculous bit of meddling by an unelwcted body that I have ever seen and flies in the face of good practise in any business albeit particularly insurance/bookmaking - assess risk and prepare for it.
So there are no other ways of assessing risk available ? sex is the only yardstick ? or just the easiest
Seems like an appropriate time to use the old scuary joke.
What is two plus two.
The man in the street says 4.
The accountant says 3.
The actuary says "what do you want it to be".
The point is that such headline figures do not reflect the underlying reasons which often have little to do with gender. For example I could state that 99% of troops killed on active service are male. And then charge women less for life assurance on active service. Equally ridiculous and wrong if you think about it.