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APIL response to Transport Committee Report on Cost of Motoring18 Jan 2012The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) has delivered its reaction to the Transport Select Committee's follow up report on the cost of motor insurance. The main recommendations of the Committee's report, and our analysis of them, are presented in our news item: Transport Committee Report on Cost of Motor Insurance that might usefully be read first. We have also presented the BIBA and ABI responses. We now look at the reaction of injury lawyers. APIL, in their tweet that linked to their published response to the Committee's report commented: "Injured people must not be made to feel like criminals for claiming." Their response to the Transport Select Committee's latest report on the cost of motor insurance was as follows: "We have long said that the answer to increases in car insurance premiums lies in the insurers’ own hands and so we welcome the committee’s call on the industry to abandon sharp practice in its handling of motor claims. "The recommendation for an investigation into cold calling is also long overdue. Solicitors’ rules on this are extremely robust and it is time for insurers and others who plague members of the public with cold calls to be subject to the same rigour. "But the priority must be for innocent victims of genuine injury, including whiplash injuries, to have access to the full and fair compensation they need. Whiplash injuries can be extremely painful and can often linger, leaving some people with chronic conditions. It must be remembered that the burden of proof lies with the victim. The defendant has every right, and opportunity, to challenge medical opinion if it is thought to be wrong. "Any measures which risk blocking people from making valid claims will leave injury victims and taxpayers effectively subsidising the insurance companies who have already accepted our premiums. It is time for the needs of vulnerable injured victims to take precedence over those whose negligence causes needless injury in the first place." Our analysis of APIL's statementWe do not believe that genuine accident victims should need to feel like criminals when they seek legal redress. A key role of those lawyers that APIL represents is to help these victims to feel empowered to pursue their claims as an innocent victim of an accident for which they were not responsible.APIL says that "the answer to increases in car insurance premiums lies in the insurers’ own hands" but there are numerous factors that inflate the cost of motor insurance over which insurers have no direct control but which can be targeted for intervention. These include costly legal fees associated with injury cases, referral practices of claims mangement companies that inflate costs, uncompetitive credit car hire and car repair costs, (sometimes unlawful) sharing of accident victim details by recovery companies and other agencies, aggressive and intrusive new case-generating tactics of claims management companies to which APIL refers in its statement and which therefore contradicts their position, an emerging litigation culture, high levels of fraud and, indeed, numerous other causes as summarised in this section of one of our industry reports: Drivers of recent car insurance price hikes. We assume that "sharp practice" of insurers refers to their uncompetitive referral practices which inflate costs. To this, APIL might also add insurers' tardy admission of liability in most fixed legal fee cases that leads to their falling out of the protocol period, potentially adding to costs, although this was not something that the committee proposed to address specifically. APIL's support for a clamp down on cold calling of accident victims and for the application of the Solicitors' Regulation Authority (SRA) stringent rules to them is consistent with our view that all claims management companies (CMCs) need to be brought under the same regulatory structures as solicitors as we presented in this section of one of our reports: Dealing with dysfunctional claims management companies. APIL's plea for effective access to justice for accident victims is reasonable. Any reduction in access to justice, after all, is, arguably, in breach of articles 6 (access to justice) and 14 (fair treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights. It is, however, in relation to the Jackson reforms of civil litigation costs that APIL has greatest anxiety in this area. APIL is, of course, quite right to imply that insurers have been sheepish in fighting marginal whiplash cases which would assist in establishing better case law in this area. Injury lawyer and ex-MP, Andrew Dismore, that heads up the Access to Justice Action Group (AJAG) concords with this position in saying: "Any new evidence about whiplash should be dealt with in the same way that issues over asbestosis and other occupational diseases have been resolved over the years: through test cases in court, with expert evidence and witnesses subjected to cross-examination by both sides." Recent developments in whiplash research emerging from, for example, the Netherlands and Australia will assist in the assessment of whiplash 'caseness' but there is no diagnostic test and it remains easy to mis-represent the true level of symptomatology for those that are motivated by securing compensation. Their final point, that again advocates for access to justice for genuine cases, makes a legitimate point that if some of these cases are denied access to justice, it is society in general and specifically taxpayers that will pick up the tab. |
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