I am afraid that because of time constraints I will not.
I welcome comments the Secretary of State made in answer to Opposition Members. He said several times that the insurance industry would be properly held to account. The Government will bring forward amendments to hold the industry to account for its assurances. On that basis, I feel able to support the Government on Second Reading—on the basis that, as the Bill progresses, those assurances by the insurance industry will be translated into words that we can approve in this place.
The Secretary of State rightly used the word “fraud” at the outset. This is where I differ slightly from the hon. Member for Cardiff Central when she talked about the ABI’s own figure that 0.3%, I think, of claims were fraudulent. It is my view that the insurance industry, as well as the enforcement agencies, including the police, has been reluctant to tackle fraud because of the cost and that therefore we are not seeing the real numbers for fraud.
There is unquestionably fraud, and wherever possible I have encouraged the insurance industry to tackle it more effectively, but we also need to acknowledge that there is a problem with claims management companies. I am talking not about regulated persons, like the hon. Lady, me and other hon. Members, but about cowboys—people who are not authorised persons under the Legal Services Act 2007 and who often act outside this jurisdiction. I have received numerous calls from individuals whom I suspect are based outside any of the UK’s legal
jurisdictions—they use sophisticated telephony systems. I wrote to Ofcom, British Telecom, my own mobile service provider and the Information Commissioner’s Office to find out where the numbers originated from, and I was told that they were spoof numbers. The problem is there is an industry of unregulated and unauthorised non-lawyers preying on vulnerable people and abusing the system. We have to recognise and tackle that.
Mindful of the time, I will make one final comment that I invite the Minister to consider. The changes that the Government propose that will benefit the British insurance sector will affect the Scottish and English legal systems differently. Let us consider someone with a car insurance policy. The Minister could be travelling from his wonderful constituency of Penrith to his family home in Perthshire, and the oddity is that if he has an accident in the middle lands, as he termed them once, he might get a certain amount of money for a soft tissue injury from a particular insurer, and yet just a couple of kilometres along the road, under the Scottish legal system, the same insurance company might have to pay out considerably more. I ask him to bear in mind the imbalance that that might create in the insurance industry.
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