Sabre told the market yesterday that it had written £173.4m of gross premium in the first nine months of 2026, up 14.3% on a year earlier, and that full year profit would be slightly higher than 2025. Its shares still fell 6.5% on the day, according to MarketScreener.
The more interesting line was about the market. In its Sabre trading update, the insurer said UK motor claims inflation has persisted at between 6% and 7% this year, and that premiums have risen but do not appear to have kept up. Competitive quoted premiums were 2.7% higher at the end of September than a year earlier, the first annual rise since 2023, according to Insurance Business.
Here is the detail worth sitting with. Claims inflation measures the cost of a claim. It says nothing about how many claims there are.
Paul Sell of Trend Tracker told a motor claims conference last week that the UK’s 36.6 million cars now cover 336 billion miles a year, both above pre-pandemic levels, while collisions are lower. His point was that lower frequency does not mean lower claims cost, with claim costs at an all-time high. He also described a barbell car parc: the oldest fleet we have had, averaging 9.7 years, with a wave of new technology at the other end.
My view is that driver assistance is part of why frequency has held down. Thatcham’s analysis of UK insurer data found Volvo XC60s with low-speed autonomous emergency braking had 21% fewer third-party injury claims than comparable cars (Thatcham Research).
So the pricing story shifts. If severity is up and frequency is down, the gap between premium and claims cost is narrower than 6% to 7% suggests, and it is not evenly spread. Newer, sensor-heavy cars crash less and cost more to fix. Older cars get less of the frequency benefit.
Sabre has told us where it stands. The question for 2027 is who has priced severity and frequency separately, and who has netted one against the other and hoped.