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Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Bill [HL]

Good. I, too, am grateful that we have nailed that one. On the other questions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, there is first this difficult issue about permissible questions and specifically questions of gender and race. They are made particularly difficult by the recent judgment of the court in relation to motor insurance. This issue is dealt with elsewhere and not in the Bill, which is solely focused on the transmission of information in the context of underwriting risk. It is not part of the scope of the Bill to discuss questions of discrimination or equalities legislation—nor should it be. On the definition of consumers and micro-businesses, we discussed informally last week what would happen with respect to the insurance of the foot of a ballet dancer or a footballer. Maybe we could call this the ““David Beckham’s foot”” question. The Explanatory Notes on Clause 1 define a consumer as, "““an ‘individual’ who is acting wholly or mainly for non-business purposes. Thus the consumer must be a natural person, rather than a legal person (such as a company or corporation). The definition expressly provides for mixed use contracts””—" for example, the insurance for a personal car that is sometimes used for business travel to be defined as a consumer insurance contract. It means that the Bill will not apply to individuals purchasing insurance that is mainly for purposes related to their trade, business or profession, which would clearly be the case in some of the examples that have been discussed. Lastly, on the cost of insurance, HM Treasury has not made an estimate of the impact of the Bill on insurance premiums. However, we have estimated that the net impact will be savings for the industry—that is, when we take account of the initial training costs and the savings as a result of fewer FOS complaints among other factors. On the basis that the industry should have net savings from this Bill being enacted, there is absolutely no reason to believe that there should be any additional cost passed on to consumers. In relation to the overall cost of insurance, these are relatively small marginal costs but ones that would impact favourably—that is, downwards—on insurance costs.