Personal Injury Commission to be established for motor insurance

A working group put in place to tackle the increasing expense of motor insurance has advocated the establishment of a personal injury commission to provide help with claims.

Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns continues to be named as Chairperson of the commission.

This includes the commissioning of medical research, reporting on global settlement amounts, in addition to settlement mechanics, examining and benchmarking of global awards for personal injuries cases.

The goal of the commission will be to investigate and also make suggestions on procedures in other jurisdictions, which may improve the claims process in Ireland.

In its report, the Cost Of Insurance Working Group also advocates a claims database to tackle “the lack of transparency in the claims area” along with a “fully functioning database” to enable gardaí to deal with the problem of suspected fraud and uninsured motorists.

The report was presented to the Government and sets out an all-inclusive package of actions to tackle identified issues in the motor insurance market.

Minister of State Murphy, the Chair of the working group, said following through on the recommendations of the report “will lead to greater stability in the pricing of motor insurance and will help prevent the volatility that we have seen in the market in the past”.

He added that the measures should “better facilitate potential new entrants to the market”.

Chief Executive Officer of insurance company FBD Fiona Muldoon mentioned her firm accepted the statement and that she was “pleased to see the plans to create a personal injuries commission to benchmark awards internationally and the proposals to strengthen the Injuries Board assessment process.

“These are measures we have previously advocated as real tangible ways to improve the claims environment in this country.”