PENALISE DANGEROUS DRIVERS NOT INJURED MOTORISTS
David Cameron has vowed to rein in the £2 billion cost of insurance claims as part of his crack down on Britain’s increasing compensation culture. Central to Mr Cameron’s campaign is tackling the 1,500 UK whiplash claims a day, the highest in Europe.
Mr Cameron
has proposed a number of ideas to achieve this including:
• Using a panel of medical experts rather than a single
doctor to sign off whiplash injuries
• Putting in place an impact speed limit of about 15mph,
below which whiplash injuries cannot be claimed
• Imposing a financial threshold below which a claim cannot
be made
Mr Cameron hopes that these actions will bring down our motor insurance premiums by fighting fraudulent claims. Hooray! We all want to see our premiums reduced. And surely no-one could argue with tackling fraudulent claims.
But we need to look a little deeper, at the effect of Mr Cameron's proposals. Picture this. As you were driving to work this morning, you duly stopped at a red traffic light. The driver behind was looking at a text he had just received and drove into the back of your car. You were very late for work as you went to the hospital, on the recommendation of the police and paramedics, to have your neck x-rayed. Thankfully nothing is broken. But your neck is beginning to ache and you have been told it is going to get worse before it gets better. You have been told that it could take anything from two weeks to two years before it stops hurting completely, or if you are one of the unlucky few, you could have permanent minor symptoms. Your head is pounding. Your car is a mess and you are going to have to take more time off to get it to the garage to get it repaired. You won't be able to play in your five a side football team for several weeks, letting the side down, and when you take the family to Alton Towers on Friday as their half term treat, you won't be able to go on any of the rides.
Are you feeling miserable enough? Now Mr Cameron says that when you try to claim some compensation for your losses and injuries in accordance with your legal rights, you should be scrutinised by a panel of medical experts, not just one as the law currently provides, you will not be able to claim anything if you cannot prove that the driver who went into the back of your car was travelling at over 15 mph and that you will have to give up part of your compensation to your lawyer, as their fees will no longer be paid in full by the insurer for the offending motorist. Insult to injury comes to mind!
The compensation culture is a myth - this is the conclusion reached by academic studies on the subject. There are many positive ideas afloat for keeping premiums down, and many concentrate on high risk drivers such as under 25 year olds. Smartbox technology will help to keep our sons and daughters safer, as well as bringing down our premiums. If insurance companies have a will to bring down premiums, they can start to do so by cutting out the additional cost and delay that is caused by their failure to deal with genuine claims efficiently and quickly. Many claims end up going to court simply because insurance companies have not complied with legal time limits. Having to prove the speed of an impact is only going to increase cost and delay. Surely the speed of the collision is not the point - the issue is whether the innocent motorist was injured or not? A doctor is the best judge of this.
Are the insurance companies going to offer us any assurance that if Mr Cameron's proposals are introduced, our premiums will come down? By how much and when? Perhaps it would be cynical to suggest that any savings made might end up in the pockets of insurance companies' shareholders, rather than being passed on to the motorist.
Let's not penalise the injured and massively inconvenienced victim of dangerous driving. Surely we should be concentrating on the dangerous driver?
-Eva Pendreich, Thomas Eggar LLP
.