The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) will publish more than 100 new statistics after reviewing its general insurance statistical publications.

The extra information will include revised capital adequacy statistics and industry-level data on premiums, claims and expenses.

The regulator will decide in the third quarter whether more data should be considered non-confidential.

“In the meantime, APRA will continue to apply confidentiality protection measures to ensure confidential information relating to an individual institution cannot be derived from APRA’s published statistics,” it said last week.

APRA received 16 submissions on a discussion paper issued in February proposing changes to its general insurance publications; it has published 11 of these responses on its website.

Aon Benfield calls for the release of class-of-business statistics at company level, such as gross and net earned premium and gross and net incurred claims.

It says the information would be useful for the Aon Benfield Insurance Risk Study.

If no changes are made, it will have to drop Australia from the study, which is used by reinsurers and others providing capital to the market, its submission warns.

The Commonwealth Grants Commission wants premium data, to assess state and territory governments’ capacity to raise stamp duty revenue, which it uses for its annual recommendations to the Federal Treasurer on the distribution of GST revenue.

“The insurance assessment redistributes some $100 million of GST revenue between states and territories,” the submission said.

A joint submission from RACQ Insurance, RACT Insurance, RAC-WA and RAA Insurance of SA agrees to publishing aggregated information that does not identify class of business, split of premiums and loss ratios.

It objects to the publication of institutional-level and class-of-business data, claiming such data will expose pricing and other commercially sensitive information.

The Insurance Council of Australia says members are “seriously concerned by APRA’s sweeping proposal” to make all data non-confidential.

It says the release of some commercially sensitive information cannot be justified as being in the public interest.