CONSUMER PROTECTION OF INSURANCE SERVICES IN ENGLISH LAW

In this paper, the author analyses the legal protection of consumers of insurance services under English law, with particular reference to the nature and scope of the pre-contractual duty of disclosure and provision of information. Proceeding from the current legal framework, which largely relies on regulatory rules, the author identifies certain structural shortcomings in legal certainty, transparency, and the effectiveness of consumer protection in the field of insurance. The central hypothesis of the paper is that such reliance on subordinate legislation, primarily administrative sources of law, rather than on comprehensive statutory regulation of the pre-contractual duty to inform, results in fragmented and less predictable consumer protection. For the purpose of obtaining a more complete perspective, the English approach is com- pared with the German legal system, in which the Insurance Contract Act provides a coherent, transparent, and consumer-accessible normative framework. On the basis of the foregoing analysis, the final part of the paper proposes solutions that would enable more effective and legally certain protection of con- sumers of insurance services under English law.

Keywords: consumer protection in insurance services, pre-contractual disclosure, duty to inform, principle of utmost good faith (bona fides), English law.