Simon Read: Comparison sites need to be forced to be more transparent about their offers

The Competition Commission is also concerned about the relationship between price-comparison websites and insurers, claiming that drivers often struggle to identify the best-value products.

Look, there's no doubt that price comparison sites have been a good thing for consumers. They have helped people learn of the financial value of shopping around and switching to better deals and they have certainly been a major force for good in reducing premiums prices and keeping them competitive.

But the market has become so competitive as a result that many insurers offer inadequate cheap cover through comparison sites in order to appear cheaper than their rivals or top the best buy tables.

They do so by stripping out benefits from policies, such as legal protection, windscreen cover, hire provision in the event of an accident or cover while driving outside the UK. They then flog the benefits to drivers as add-ons which quickly inflate the price to, quite possibly, much higher than a rival's policy.

Another trick is to massively increase the excess, the amount that you agree to pay in any claim. If the excess is raised to, say, £1,000, then the premiums can be slashed. But if anyone has such a high excess on their policy, it will make it almost impossible for them to get a pay-out for a claim, unless the car is a total write-off.

In other words, picking a policy through a comparison site could mean ending up with the wrong policy and the wrong price. To avoid that the only sensible solution is to contact all the insurers yourself and compare quotes, which could be a major pain.

That's why the sites must become clearer about what they're offering. A solution could be to rank policies by the quality of their cover rather than by price. But that would mean comparison sites doing decent research, rather than simply taking cash to list insurers' offers.

It's also time they were forced to admit how much they're being paid by each insurer so that we understand why some firms may get a higher listing in the rankings than others.

s.read@independent.co.uk

Twitter: @simonnread