Unisex insurance plans dropped

Plans to ban insurance especially for women, or giving them preferential premiums, have been dropped by the European Commission.

16:30 14 June 2004

Plans to ban insurance especially for women, or giving them preferential premiums, have been dropped by the European Commission.

The decision follows an angry reaction from the majority of member states at a private meeting, convened to discuss the ground-breaking proposals contained within the gender discrimination directive.

At the meeting, held earlier this month, 17 of the 25 state representatives voted against the proposals to ban gender discrimination by insurers, which were first announced last year.

The news will be greeted warmly by Britain's insurers, who have voiced their own fears that the insurance industry would lose millions of pounds were the unisex measures to be enacted.

Jacqui Smith, the deputy minister for equality and women's issues, who attended the meeting on behalf of the UK, told the Independent: "What was clear at the meeting was that there were many other states that also expressed concerns about the prospect of banning actuarial gender calculations from the insurance industry."

Ms Smith continued by claiming that, although she and her colleagues would support the imposition of a gender discrimination directive "in some areas" of finance, "we do support a position where you can differentiate between genders if there is up-to-date factual evidence."