Halo believes that the recent CMA report into the cost of motor insurance has missed a golden opportunity to introduce more sophisticated and beneficial competition into the accident repair supply market.
Eddie Longworth, Executive Chairman at Halo commented:
“By conducting a poorly structured study of the quality of repairs in the marketplace, and subsequently deciding to avoid this whole issue, the CMA has missed the chance to encourage insurers to fundamentally restructure their relationships with repairers. The cost of a repair is, quite rightly, a key factor for insurers but we know that consumers also value a broader range of service criteria and we had hoped that the CMA would examine wider issues of consumer benefit.
At the same time the cap on credit hire rates has not been supported by an outright ban on referral fees so we foresee that the emphasis will now switch to credit repairs with a subsequent increase in costs for insurers and, ultimately, consumers.”
In our submission to the CMA, we had argued that standardised repair costing would distort competition amongst suppliers and so we welcome the rejection of any artificial attempts at price control.
Ros Hanson, Director of Experience at Halo said:
“A key responsibility of suppliers is to drive a lower cost higher service environment for our clients and customers and any attempts to interfere in the free exchange of goods would only act as a brake on innovation and new methods of repairer and insurer co-operation. However, with the CMA largely ignoring the whole supply chain structure we must all still take this opportunity to re-examine the best methods of delivering the new generation of repair and service solutions”
Download the report here from the Gov.uk site
