Date: 11 March 2020
Disclosure:
The spreadsheet below provides data in four separate tables covering the time period 1995-2018 held by the Bank of England (the ‘Bank’), which includes the Prudential Regulation Authority (‘PRA’).
Gross Written Premiums submitted by UK insurance firms for the years 1995-2018
- Since 1995, there have been some changes in the way that insurance premium information has been collected. Therefore it is not possible to provide tables which provide a consistent set of data that is comparable across all the years from 1995 to 2018. In order to avoid making arbitrary decisions about groupings of lines of business into other categories, we have provided the data in the four tables as follows:
Table 1 is an extract of data from Financial Services Authority (‘FSA’) forms 21-24 for 1995-2004. Data is broken down into five broad lines of business, but should be consistent across that period of time. The coverage should include all authorised insurers except Lloyd’s of London, which was not subject to FSA reporting at that time. Premiums represent direct business and facultative reinsurance business written, gross of reinsurance ceded.
Table 2 data is extracted from the same FSA forms 21-24, but for 2005 to 2015. Data is now broken down into eight lines of business, separating personal and commercial business for the first time. Coverage and premium definition will be as in Table 1.
In addition to the eight-category breakdown required of reporters, a new form (‘F20A’) was introduced from 2005. This required firms to provide an additional breakdown of premiums into far more detailed lines of business, and is shown in Table 3. Coverage and premium definition is again as in Table 1. It should be noted, however, that occasionally firms did not submit Form 20A as required, or the total business reported in F20A did not equal the total business reported in F21-24. Major discrepancies were followed up, but some differences remain, and the total business shown in Table 3 is not identical to the total business reported in Table 2.
Table 4 relates to data extracted from the National Specific Templates designed by the PRA but based on the harmonised Solvency II reporting templates. There are a couple of significant differences in coverage:
- Lloyd’s of London data is included for the first time;
- Facultative reinsurance business is now excluded, but proportional treaty reinsurance business is included.
A different approach has also been taken to the categorisation of some lines of business, in particular the introduction of Workers’ Compensation as a separate category, and differences in the definition of Assistance business. Also, the category Mixed Commercial Package business shown in Table 3 is broken down into its respective sub categories of business in Table 4.
For all these reasons, it is not practical to make direct comparisons between lines of business across all the years in the time period requested.
With regard to the second part of your request in relation to ‘the overall splits of gross written premiums across different types of distribution channels’, may I explain that data split by Distribution Channel was not collected in the pre-Solvency II regulatory data so the Bank does not have data for the earlier time period. Furthermore, since the publication of the 2016 data in the disclosure log on the Bank’s website, the format for reporting Distribution Channel has changed within the NS07 template and it would not be comparable to provide the data in a separate table.