Insurers denounce that the Government ignored them to negotiate the premium tax
Madrid
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The year 2021 begins with curves for insurers. The balance of the year that has just ended is not catastrophic as in other sectors, but it does show that no one is exempt from being hit by the crisis. And when the business looks more resentful, the Government imposes its tax increase.
He Tax on Insurance Premiums this year it goes from 6% to 8%. Two percentage points that will be noted in the final bill of the annual policies -except for health policies- and that, according to the Unespa employer, has not been negotiated with the sector. “We found out about him through the press conference of the Council of Ministers in which the bill on General State Budgets (PGE) was approved. Under these conditions it is difficult to have a productive dialogue when the decisions have already been made public, ”said Pilar González de Frutos, president of the institution that represents insurance entities.
Thus, the leader has avoided unloading the responsibility of the tax on the members of the Executive, since ultimately "The final responsibility lies with the government itself". The message of denunciation of the ways in which La Moncloa chose is clear.
Despite everything, as ABC revealed, several national and international insurers, once 2020 is closed, are internally analyzing how avoid your clients an increase in the price of policies. The tax must necessarily be included in the annual renewal of the contract and it will be the client who ends up paying it, but the entities are studying how to alleviate this burden; either with reductions in the price of the coverage or with their extension at no cost.
The Government, with this measure, expects to collect an extra 507 million through this tax. And in the event that insurers cannot mitigate the blow to their clients, the impact on families is clear. Its effect will be that, on average, 17.7 million households who have some type of policy (95% of the total), the increase in the average premium rate will be around 28 euros this year compared to the previous one, as ABC announced.
The business in 2020
Insurers' income from premiums at the end of this last financial year stood at 58,850 million euros, 8.30% less than a year earlier. The reason: the impact of the crisis and the economic stoppage in certain branches, such as life, whose business fell by 20.78%.
"Of the income achieved in the year, 37,046 million euros corresponded to the non-life branch and the remaining 21,804 million to life, as shown by the provisional data collected by the Cooperative Investigation of Insurance Entities (ICEA)", indicate the data given to meet today at a press conference.
Despite everything, in Unespa They highlighted that "insurance has performed substantially better than GDP itself", in view of the fact that the economy could have fallen to double digits in 2020. The decline in the insurance business was, then, less, at the same time that maintained their levels of solvency and profitability.
Filomena impact
Although it is still too early to be able to make an exact balance of damages caused by Filomena, González de Frutos has given some sectorial figure: "Only for home insurance we have an approximation of 60,000 reported claims, from January 6 to 14". A bulky amount that shows that the beginning of the year will mean a significant cost for the sector in compensation and repairs.
Of that figure, almost half refer to damage caused by snow in homes, while the remaining amount has to do with rain and hail, “because Filomena entered from the south, where it did not cause snowfall but did flood and saw affected by hail ».
