Brokers wanting to deal directly with the Federal Government’s Australian Reinsurance Pool Corporation (ARPC) to purchase terrorism cover have been knocked back. The ARPC says it prefers dealing with insurers, and won’t deal with cases on a policy-by-policy basis.

Currently the ARPC – which was introduced in July last year in a bid to protect commercial insurance policyholders against certain acts of terror – charges insurers a premium on top of base premiums, which is passed on to policyholders.

ARPC CEO Neil Weeks says the issue arose after several brokers contacted the pool requesting that brokers handle the reinsurance rather than the insurers.

“The only way we’d consider this is if insurers granted brokers permission to deal with the reinsurance, and even then they could only grant the permission to one broker,” he said. “Insurers would be limited to one broker handling the reinsurance because we don’t operate according to a policy-by-policy basis.”