ABSTRACT
Lord Davidson argued during the Parliamentary debate on the Insurance Bill that the British Government should “monitor and test the effi cacy of Clause 16”. 1 The reason for making this suggestion was to “avoid relentless contracting out simply by way of forms [because it] . . . would undermine much of the benefi t of this reform”. 2
This hostility towards the contracting out provisions of the Insurance Act 2015 (“2015 Act”) should not come as a surprise. Even the Law Commission viewed them as a necessary evil in the context of non-consumer insurance, treating the relevant sections as the result of a balancing act. They were included in order to persuade the insurance industry to support the most comprehensive insurance law development since the enactment of the Marine Insurance Act (MIA) 1906. This overarching goal also explains the absence of any distinction among the different classes of non-consumer insurance that the 2015 Act covers.
