Supplementary memorandum submitted by
the Association of British Insurers
Thank you for your letter of 30 March, asking
for additional information to support your inquiry into novice
drivers.
The Committee has asked for claims statistics
of supervised learners, compared to novice drivers and the driving
population as a whole. For the purposes of this memorandum, we
have equated "novice drivers" with 17-18 year olds.
The supervised learners sampled are policyholders only; we do
not have data on claims made by supervised learners as "named
drivers" on a policy. This is because our members do not
record data in a way that makes this information easy to extract
from their databases.
A survey of our members in 2003 showed that
the proportion of supervised learners making claims is on a par
with the overall driving population, but significantly lower than
novice drivers:
|
| Proportion
|
|
| Supervised learner | 16%—approx 1 in 6
|
| Novice driver | 32%—approx 1 in 3
|
| Overall driving population | 16%—approx 1 in 6
|
|
However, the average cost of a claim made by a supervised
learner is more than two-thirds higher than the average claim
cost of the overall driving population:
|
| Average cost claim (£)
|
|
| Male
| Female | Both
|
| Supervised learner | 602
| 264 | 426 |
| Novice driver | 1,710
| 587 | 1,300 |
| Overall driving population | 283
| 209 | 252 |
|
Insurers set premiums for individuals according to the probability
of making a claim and the probable size of any claims. The significantly
higher average claims cost of a supervised learner explains why
they pay more in premiums than other drivers do. Note that the
average premium broadly corresponds with the average claims cost:
|
| Average premium (£)
|
|
| Male
| Female | Both
|
| Supervised learner | 726
| 559 | 639 |
| Novice driver | 1,311
| 837 | 1,138 |
| Overall driving population | 400
| 330 | 371 |
|
The Committee has also asked what progress has been made
by the ABI and Department for Transport (DfT) in sharing data
on novice driver collisions. Since we gave oral evidence to the
Committee on 28 February, we have met Dr Ladyman to discuss how
the ABI might be able to provide additional data to the DfT on
this issue. We explained that individual insurers collect whatever
data they consider necessary to support their business, and that
the information held would differ between insurers. It is therefore
difficult to state categorically what data our members have which
the DfT does not already have access to.
We have agreed with the DfT that it will provide us with
a prioritised list of hypotheses it would like to use insurance
data to test, and we will consult with our members further on
this issue. Separately, we are already working with the Driving
Standards Agency (DSA) on a project to identify specific "high-risk"
groups of young drivers. Accordingly, we have agreed to give the
DSA access to the Claims and Underwriting Exchange—a database
that records all incidents reported to participating insurance
companies.
26 April 2007
| 
