Nanny state's mothering instinct is smothering us

They're at it again! I told you they would be. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) is reported to be planning its next wheeze. The fistfuls of bumf which now has to accompany each piece of new business was the product of politically correct do-gooding ad nauseam. Most ordinary people will tell you that it only confuses them, and indeed often actually misleads them, rather than doing any real good.

The Regulators, in all their various guises, spent literally years in designing what they thought to be the best display of information for simple people who were about to risk their wallets in the jungle that is the British Life Assurance Industry. The end product is the latest in a long line of increasingly nannified formats. The most 'brilliant' component in it is the fact that all insurance companies are bound to use the rates of projected growth laid down from time to time by the FSA.

By being able to move the goalposts according to the prevailing investment climate, the Regulator can always claim that it is reacting to current trends and can therefore paint as accurate a picture as possible.

But that is daydreaming. In reality the opposite applies. By taking current conditions as a basis for calculation, plus a token squint into the murky crystal ball, it means that the chance of being anywhere near right over future terms as long as 10 or 25 years is virtually nil. If you don't believe me, take a glance at how far they have been off-target since 1987.

Growth rates of 10% and 13%! Do me a favour, please. Oh, I realise that the percentages shown are only illustrations and are not to be taken to indicate what might be paid out. But they can repeat this caveat until they are blue in the face. The fact is that the 'punter' knows the projections are laid down by officialdom, presumably only after some top-class brainwork has been spent on them, and will always feel that he is entitled to give them a certain amount of credence.

The standardised Prospective Policyholder's Information Pack, as designed by the Regulator, is the definitive proof of Bridgland's Law of Do-Gooding, which has appeared on these pages many times over the years. This sage piece of philosophy, for the benefit of my younger readers, was formulated only after decades of close factual observation at the University of Real Life. It says that, "the amount of any real good done in a given situation decreases in inverse proportion to the amount of do-gooding perpetrated upon it."

And what are the Regulators up to now? Stand by to greet the arrival of the latest dodge. It's to be called the 'literacy levy'. Apparently, the FSA is still unhappy that the public have not received enough investment education after the mis-selling scandals of recent years. (Most of which would never have been scandals at all if the stock market had behaved itself, but there you go, that's compensation culture.)

This alleged lack of education, which exists despite all the FSA's aforesaid efforts to produce the pre-investment information pack, is to be corrected in a way that only a bureaucrat could devise. The 'literacy levy', which is to finance the operation (and doubtless mean more jobs at the FSA), is to be paid for by the banks and life offices.

The cost? £200m is forecast. Tsaw! A mere bagatelle you scoff. After all, the insurance industry (ie, you and me) already coughs up £400m each year to run the Motor Insurers' Bureau, also for the general good. The premium paying public won't even notice this. It's called socialism.

I took my car in for servicing the other day. They look after you well at our garage. Nice plush sofa to sit on while you wait. Biscuits to nibble, free proper coffee ad lib, widescreen TV to watch. Even a tray of sandwiches appears if you're still waiting at lunchtime. All that. Plus all the daily papers to browse through.

Unfortunately there was somebody's pinafored auntie on the telly, rabbiting on about how to make a cheese omelette or something. And the makeover twerps on the other side were digging up somebody's garden in Luton or somewhere. That left the papers. All the proper papers were being read by my fellow customers. There was only The Independent left. Looking furtively to the left and right, I slid my hand out to grab it. Good, nobody had seen me; they were all engrossed in The Sun and the Telegraph.

But I was in for a surprise. On the letters page, I saw that one of their correspondents had written in about the controversial MMR jab for children.

Why, he queried, had nobody in the insurance industry come up with a scheme to insure against the alleged potential dangers in this? Why not, say, a single premium policy paying out a couple of million if the child experiences the onset of autism within six weeks of vaccination? The risk, he said, was low, and a premium of a couple of quid ought to see a handsome profit for the insurers. And everybody - the Government, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical profession and the general public - would stand to gain.

But then he answered his own question. Maybe it's because the risk isn't that low at all, he explained with Indy-fied wisdom. And somebody, somewhere, knows something that we don't.

All the same, all credit to the Indy for giving space to the subject.

If I'm pushed again for something to read in 12,000 miles' time, I'll give them another go.