John Curran
Question:312. Deputy John Curran asked the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport the progress made regarding the establishment of a motor insurance database; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [28358/19]
View answerWednesday, 3 July 2019
Questions (312)
Written answers
The database to identify uninsured drivers is known as the Motor Third Party Liability (MTPL) Project.
My Department issued a letter of intent to Insurance Ireland for amending of Road Traffic Act legislation to support the project in 2018 as part of the forthcoming Road Traffic (Miscellaneous Provisions Bill . This Bill has been referred to Cabinet Committee for further consideration. Ongoing meetings of the database project board are being held to oversee the project’s implementation. The Motor Insurers’ Bureau of Ireland (MIBI) state that the current project focus is on privately insured vehicles, which represent 92% of insured vehicles. Fleet policies, which present many challenges as insurers do not currently successfully capture all of the required detailed data regarding vehicles and drivers in a timely way, will be addressed in a later project phase.
The key reasons for the lengthening of the timetable for delivery of the MTPL database are:
- Delivery has now been significantly expanded to cover details on all Private, Commercial and Fleet motor vehicle information
- Delivery of the capability to capture and validate driver number details will require both an initial industry-wide start date for the collection of data for new policies and an extended period to allow for driver number details to be collected on normal renewals.
- Before insurance companies can start requiring customers to supply both their driver number details and those of their named drivers on the policy, amendments to the Road Traffic Acts will need to be in place.
- Mechanisms will have to be developed and agreed between all insurers and DTTAS Shannon for them to gain access to the NVDF to validate driver numbers.
Insurance Ireland and all the insurance companies operating in Ireland, working together with DTTAS, An Garda Síochána, and the MIBI, through the MTPL Insurance Database Project Board, have now structured the delivery of Phase 2 of the MTPL project into four sub-phases, namely:
- Delivery of all information currently covered by section 78(a) of the Road Traffic Act (2016) for both private and commercial vehicles, by end 2019.
- Delivery of driver number capture and validation capability, by end of 2019, subject to the necessary legislative amendments being passed.
- Delivery of motor fleet information, by 2020.
- Delivery of all driver numbers for all drivers (following the completion of the required renewal cycles), by 2021.