A ruling in the European Court of Justice in 2014 decided that all motor vehicles on private land would need to be covered by motor insurance, despite not being for use on public roads. This requirement was expected to increase insurance premiums by £1 Billion a year – that’s an extra £50 on every single driver’s car insurance.
In 2014 the European Court of Justice (CJEU or ECJ) made a ruling on a Slovenian case, of a person injured by a vehicle on private land, which meant that by EU law all vehicles used on private land would need to be covered by motor vehicle insurance (see link 1). This ruling had wide-sweeping implications both for the insurance industry and for the public, as vehicles previously sitting well outside of motor insurance requirements would then be considered as requiring it, such as ride-on lawnmowers, quad bikes, motorsport vehicles and many other agricultural vehicles not intended for public road use (see link 2).
By leaving the EU, the UK Government was able to introduce primary legislation to remove the impact of this ruling from the UK statute books and return UK motor insurance laws to the way in which they were intended to operate. If left unaddressed, the ECJ ruling was projected to increase overall motor insurance annual costs by over £1 Billion a year, which would have seen consumer premiums increase by on average £50 each per year – as well as those who own motor vehicles for use on private land having to also take out an additional insurance package and the costs that that entails (see link 3).
When the primary legislation to remove the requirement was discussed in the House of Lords in March 2022, the Baroness Vere stated that ‘if Vnuk had been implemented in full, it would have had a catastrophic impact on the motorsports industry’, and that adding a motor insurance requirement to the industry would have ‘brought little benefit at a very high cost’ estimated at around £458 Million per year. She went on to say that this would have been ‘prohibitively expensive’ for the sector, effectively making most of the sector unviable. At the time of the debate in 2022, the motorsport industry in the UK turned over almost £3 Billion a year and generated full-time employment for around 38,000 people and part-time work for a further 100,000 people (see link 4).
In short, leaving the EU saves all British motorists around £50 a year, along with saving millions of Brits the cost of one or more additional motor insurance premiums, each and every year – and that’s before calculating the increase due to inflation.
All the source material for this benefit:
Link 1: Judgement of the Court (Third Chamber), 4 September 2014, ‘Damijan Vnuk V Zavarovalnica Triglav’, https://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?num=C-162/13
Link 2: Motor Insurers Bureau press release, 25 April 2022, ‘MIB welcomes removal of EU’s Vnuk ruling from UK law’, https://www.mib.org.uk/media-centre/news/2022/april/mib-welcomes-removal-of-eu-s-vnuk-ruling-from-uk-law/
Link 3: A. Shalchi (2021), House of Commons Research Briefing, ‘The cost of motor insurance: impact of the Vnuk case’, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9321/
Link 4: Hansard (2022), House of Lords Chamber, ‘Motor Vehicles (Compulsory Insurance) Bill’,
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2022-03-18/debates/8ACA5C1A-A614-4ADA-8325-38CCA17954F5/MotorVehicles(CompulsoryInsurance)Bill