The government is legislating to ensure that insurers can continue to use gender as a pricing factor for all contracts entered into prior to December 21st, 2012.
The announcement was contained in City minister Mark Hoban’s response to the European Court of Justice’s recent ruling in the Test Achat case that gender cannot be used as a risk factor when drawing up insurance contracts.
In a written statement, he said the government’s view was that the ruling only applied to contracts “entered into on or after 21st December, 2012.”
He said: “Any contracts with gender-sensitive pricing of premiums or benefits concluded ahead of 21 December 2012 can continue unchanged after that date.”
He said that the government would be amending its own Equalities Act in order to bullet proof contracts entered into before date against the risk of being challenged on sex discrimination grounds.
Hoban said the government had been “very disappointed” about the ruling. “The judgment goes against the grain of the common sense approach to equality which the UK government wants to see. The government believes that nobody should be treated unfairly because of their gender, but that financial services providers should be allowed to make sensible decisions based on sound analysis of relevant risk factors.”
He also expressed the government’s disappointment at the European Commission’s decision not to give greater clarity by amending the gender directive to take account of the judgement. The Commission has said instead that it will issue guidance for how the ruling should be applied.
Hoban also said that the UK government’s disappointment over the ruling was widely shared across the EU.
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