Car insurance quotes higher in ethnically diverse areas

Update 5th September: BBC News has removed an article from our website about car insurance premiums as it did not meet our normal editorial standards.

The article, published on 26 February, described a correlation between higher car insurance premiums in ethnically diverse areas, taking into account crime and road accident levels based on data taken from a government measure called the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD).

However the article did not explain clearly and fully enough that we had not established why premiums were higher (causation rather than correlation) or the limitations of the data we used and cited.

In particular the article did not make clear that the broad IMD measures do not capture a number of types of crime and car accidents likely to be closely related to insurance risk, or the age of the IMD data, and that insurance firms also have data on claims that they do not reveal that might explain differences in premiums between areas with different levels of ethnic diversity.

Separately, the original version of the article included a subheading, 'the ethnicity penalty,' which should have appeared in quotation marks to denote that these were the words of Citizens Advice - and did not fully explain the precise nature of the Citizens Advice research cited in the article.

On 2 April we amended the article to add further context with a note of clarification after readers got in touch.

On 20 May we temporarily withdrew the online article while we investigated further.

Given the original editing errors in not prominently warning about the difficulty of establishing direct causation, the limitations of the data used and the failure to present the Citizens Advice research in its full context, we have taken the decision to permanently remove the online article.

We have a also published a statement on the BBC's Corrections and Clarifications page.