Not everyone on the panel is convinced the joke has much longer to run. Colin Fox, cyber insurance consultant at Integrity, part of Hayes Parsons, was the most sceptical: “I don’t think it’s sustainable,” he said, pointing out that nobody expected the current soft cycle to outlast the last hard market by this much – rates jumped by as much as 100-150% almost overnight back in 2020-21, in his recollection, and the pendulum was assumed to swing back on a similar timescale. It hasn’t. Fox also flagged early signs of hardening in the US market, historically the bellwether for London, which he thinks could feed through to UK pricing within six to twelve months – though he’s cautious about pinning down exactly when.
