Pet Insurance Industry News

← Back

Pet Insurance premiums rising

20/07/2004

The proliferation of companies now offering Pet Insurance should be evidence enough that the insurance sector is becoming both an incredibly diverse, and an incredibly lucrative, sector.

However, the wide variety of increasingly obscure objects and appendages which can now be covered by insurers somewhere, if not everywhere, has been accompanied by a general hike in prices, particularly with car and Home Insurance, according to new research carried out by the AA.

Since 1994 the average cost of Car Insurance has almost doubled while home cover has effectively remained static, says the AA.

The new research comes as the AA's benchmark British Insurance Premium Index prepares to celebrate 10 years of tracking car and Home Insurance premiums, during which time the cost of comprehensive cover has risen by 86 per cent.

The director of AA Insurance, Neale Phillips, said: "It's been a dramatic decade. What the next ten years will bring is hard to say, but motorists are more likely to be hit by costs such as tolls, congestion charging, fuel prices and parking than by rising insurance premiums."

Over the decade the cost of petrol has risen from 57p/litre to 80p/litre (40 per cent), and the cost of a family car has risen from £10,500 to £12,900 (23 per cent).

As for the number of cars on the UK's roads, this figure has risen from 23.8 million to 28.5 million (20 per cent).

With house insurance, today premiums are less than 1 per cent higher than in July 1994, although they fell by nearly 15 per cent to July 1996. It then took five years for rates to climb back to their July 1994 position.

The cost of contents insurance has consistently remained marginally higher than buildings although a slight increase over the current quarter does not suggest a trend.

© 1998-2005 DeHavilland Information Services plc. All rights reserved.

Endsleigh Insurance Services Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. This can be checked on the FSA Register by visiting its web site at www.fsa.gov.uk/register.
Endsleigh Insurance Services Limited. Company No: 856706 registered in England at Shurdington Road, Cheltenham Spa, Gloucestershire GL51 4UE.