lawman wrote:
safespeed said Quote:
Nonsense. All problems should be solved as cheaply and as effectively as possible. You did understand that we're proposing that all drivers should be insured automatically funded from a levy on motor fuel didn't you? No one 'gets off'. Everyone has insurance, and we can claw back the massive resources that uninsured driving is consuming.
Safespeed, i did understand that, and as i pointed out, this system has failed in south africa. I'd just add that i have spent 20 years working in motor underwriting, motor claims, and law, so i do have some idea of the issues.
However, since you think i haven't thought about what i'm saying, lets look at the maths. Take a currently uninsured driver who does 6000 milesp.a, in a car that averages 25mpg. he will therefore buy 240 gallons of fuel p.a. If the levy was an extra pound per gallon, this driver would be paying £240pa to 'insure' his car. Bear in mind that the average direct cost (ie not including admin costs) of a non personal injury claim is £1200, and you see that the fund would be bankrupt very quickly.
Also, all the 18 year olds who currently buy 1 litre cars because they're cheap to insure, would buy the fastest they could afford and claims, and claim costs, would rise.
Currently motorists are paying for:
- Their own third party insurance
- The MIB
- The insurance database
- uninsured losses
- Their own uninsured loss recovery
- Policing uninsured driving
- ~250,000 prosecution per annum for uninsured driving (and No, they do not make a profit)
- ~100,000 vehicle seizures and a smaller number of crushing per annum (and no, they do not make a profit either.)
- cost of sales of ~30 million motor insurance policies per annum
Under my scheme motorists would pay for:
- third party motor insurance
- costs of sales of a few hundred 'block' policies.
Of course many would choose to purchase Comprehensive cover, but there's no change there.
This is a problem that can be made to vanish overnight at a saving to society of £100s of millions per annum.
lawman wrote:
The answer has to be punishment and enforcement-the various methods of fuel levies (south africa), basic insurance with the driver's licence (canada), or cheap tpo insurance with everything else an add on (Poland) have been tried and they dont work. Germany has strict checks,strict enforcement, and severe penalties, and it does work.
Who say the system in South Africa doesn't work?
And clearly the system in this country isn't working. We HAVE increased enforcement - at great cost - and it isn't getting better.
The problem is that this is a Genie, and once out of the bottle it's very hard to put back in. In fact, I'd say it was impossible, given real world resource constraints. If we hadn't let it out in the first place, that would be one thing. But we did. That's history. Now we have to find our way out and there's absolutely no indication that increased policing is likely to be effective AT ALL, let alone cost effective.