More than a third of UK motor insurance policyholders are now reluctant to make a claim on their own policies, afraid that doing so would push premiums higher, according to new research from CRIF, the analytics and credit-information group. The finding, drawn from a survey of 5,000 consumers across Europe conducted by Opinium Research between March and April 2026, places the UK above the European average of 31% and second only to Ireland, where 41% of drivers share the same concern.
The figures land at an awkward moment for the UK motor insurance market. After two years in which premiums broadly retreated from their post-pandemic highs, prices have started moving upwards again. Defaqto data cited in the CRIF report confirms the renewed upward trend, while the Association of British Insurers has pointed to persistently elevated repair costs as a structural driver. Against that backdrop, only 13% of UK policyholders in the CRIF survey felt that motor insurance costs had stabilised or fallen.
The affordability pressure
The squeeze is not confined to premiums. Nearly four in ten respondents (39%) said that insurance costs, compounded by recent fuel price increases, are making driving unaffordable as a whole. Motor insurance is now the most commonly held financial product among UK adults, held by 59% of the population, ahead of home (53%) and home contents cover (51%). The breadth of that exposure means that affordability stress in this segment has a wider economic footprint than it would in a more discretionary product category.
Sara Costantini, regional director for the UK and Ireland at CRIF, said: “This is putting a major strain on the relationship between insurers and their customers, especially for a type of cover they cannot easily go without. This makes it all the more important that insurers rebuild confidence as part of efforts to get premium costs down.”
Policyholders are themselves indicating where they think the industry should move. More than four in ten (43%) want insurers to do more to improve affordability and consistency of pricing. Nearly a third (31%) say insurers need to be more transparent about how premiums are calculated and structured. Perhaps most notable from a data and technology perspective, a quarter of respondents said they would be prepared to share more personal data with their insurer in exchange for lower premiums, a signal that appetite for usage-based and data-enriched products may be growing despite wider consumer anxieties about data privacy.
Market and regulatory read-across
The data-sharing finding matters for the insurtech and open-finance sectors. Telematics-based motor products have existed for over a decade but have struggled to move beyond a relatively narrow demographic of younger or newly qualified drivers. If cost pressure is now nudging mainstream policyholders toward greater data-sharing willingness, there may be a wider commercial opening for connected-vehicle analytics platforms and open-banking-enriched underwriting models.
Regulatory context is also relevant. The FCA has been scrutinising pricing practices in retail insurance since the general insurance pricing rules came into force in 2022, which banned the loyalty penalty and required firms to offer existing customers the same prices as new ones. Those rules were designed in part to restore trust, yet the CRIF data suggests that anxiety about price consequences remains deeply embedded in policyholder behaviour. The regulator will likely take note of findings suggesting that a significant share of customers are self-rationing their use of a mandatory product.
CRIF positions its own open-banking analytics and decisioning tools as a solution to more accurate, fairer pricing, and the report forms part of the firm’s wider 2026 Banking on Banks series. The second report in the series, examining the gap between consumer and business financial services, is due later this year.
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