by Richard Craig
26 October 2011
The outcry over the rising cost of car insurance may be abating after UK prices over the last quarter were shown to have either dropped or stablised.
From July to September, according to AA data, the average price of fully comprehensive cover for a 12 month period dropped by 0.3%. Although in practical terms this only represents a drop in cost of £2, any decline in prices must surely be encouraging.
The blame for the rise in prices has been laid by some squarely at the door of personal injury lawyers and particularly the practice of paying ‘referral fees’ to third parties that accumulate and disseminate the details of people wishing to make an injury claim after an accident.
"The past two years have seen the biggest-ever rises in premiums as insurers struggled to close a widening gap between premium income and claims costs … Something had to give," Simon Douglas, director of AA Insurance, told Yahoo! Finance.
He sounds a note of caution, however:
"I believe that this fall is a respite rather than the start of a trend. Premiums are likely to continue rising next year, but at a much more modest rate," adds Douglas.