Insurers ignoring scamera points

Scamera fines don't indicate bad driving say insurers

By PH Staff / Monday, 17 October 2005 / Loading comments

Drive safely

A survey by The Times finds that insurers are hardly bothering to increase premiums, so widespread is the acquisition of points on driving licences, and so lacking are they as an indicator of an increased driving risk.

Over 12 million people have been caught by speed cameras since their introduction by the Tories in 1992, and over two million were fined £60 and received three points in 2004 alone. However, the survey, conducted on behalf of The Times by insurance broker A&A Group, found that many insurers don't raise premiums for one speeding offence, and many also ignore the second. They used routinely to add £50 to the premiums of those caught by speed cameras.

The conclusion is clear, and was pointed out by Andrew Blowers, chief executive of insurer Swiftcover, who said that so many ordinary, safe drivers get three points that it is no longer an indication that they are a greater risk. He said that cameras don't take circumstances into account when dishing out the fines. Many drivers were driving safely given the conditions at the time, he said, but cameras had no discretion.

Road safety campaign Safe Speed said that this was clear and dramatic evidence of speed camera policy failure. If speed cameras identified drivers with higher than average crash risks, then the very sophisticated risk assessment systems that insurance companies use would clearly detect risk differences, said Safe Speed.

Safe Speed founder Paul Smith said: "But it's far worse than that because at the very least we would have expected speeding convictions to represent an 'exposure proxy'. People who drive higher mileages are more exposed to the risk of crashes and more exposed to speeding convictions. We'd expect to see a substantial increase in insurance premiums for drivers with speeding convictions due to this effect alone.

"The Times figures almost certainly show that the average driver with speeding convictions pays less insurance per mile driven than the average driver with a clean licence. That's exactly the opposite of the message we're getting from Government.

"The Government is dangerously wrong. Speed cameras are the wrong road safety policy and we have to get them off our roads right now. If we had put the same resources into real road safety policies instead of speed cameras we'd now have over 1,000 fewer road deaths each year.

"We're penalising millions of safe drivers and it's making the roads more dangerous - everyone is concentrating on the wrong safety factor."

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