Under new proposals aimed at reducing the amount paid out by insurers for personal injury claims, the Government plans to prevent whiplash claims being pursued where the impact speed is less than 15 miles an hour. Mark Lampkin, a Chester based motorcycle accident lawyer who also appears on Radio as the “Legal Eagle” analyses the new proposals.
Click play to hear Mark explain the proposed changes.
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For a long time the government have been concerned at the inexorable rise in insurance premiums and the adverse effect this has on the economy and compliance with driving laws. People are more likely to drive uninsured if the risk of capture is outweighed by the price of insurance. To suppress claims and reduce costs various schemes have been trialled for example just allowing lawyers to claim controlled and fixed costs for road traffic accidents.
Claimant lawyers representing the injured masses have got on with any system imposed and lived with ever reducing income.
Lawyers have had to pay out unnecessary and disgraceful referral fees to claims companies, insurers, some unions, recovery drivers and even the police just to get cases: a scandal that needs to be sorted out.
Worse still we have all been bombarded by spurious texts offering thousands for the accident we never had and all this has riled those in power and others such as Jack Straw who, although supposedly a man of the people seems to be pandering to the profits of bulldogs and meerkats by doing all he can to reduce the cost of claims to insurers.
Some of his efforts are well placed, particularly forcing a ban on referral fees being paid to unscrupulous companies who do no more than buy and sell accident victims details for filthy lucre. Those chasing ambulances are not lawyers but interfering and unnecessary middlemen so by all means remove their cost from the system and from our premiums.
But the devil is always in the detail and now surely things have gone too far with the proposals in the Motor Insurance Regulation Bill now put before parliament that amount to a severe and unmerited attack on the rights of innocent people injured through the fault of other drivers. The future is particularly bleak for bikers.
Road accidents are avoidable, but inevitable, and as population grows so does congestion and risk of collision. Anyone who has been in a RTA knows even a minor bump can cause costly damage and severe pain and disruption for weeks for which presently they are rightly compensated. The new proposals will only allow whiplash claims to be made where there is “objective evidence of injury” so pestering your GP or busy A&E will be essential. Just taking paracetomol and getting on with it will mean losing the right to claim for your pain. The brave will lose out, period.
More controversial however is the proposal to make all injured claimants have to prove that the relative impact speed of the two vehicles was greater than 15 miles an hour, an almost impossible task that could only be proved by engineering calculations that would defeat NASA.
There you are sitting at traffic lights and hit from behind. You sustain painful whiplash that gets initially worse, interrupts your work and pleasure and gives you a miserable few weeks or months. You will only be able to be compensated if you wait four hours in hospital to be inordinately embarrassed when you waste the valuable time of an overworked Doctor who can only tell you to take painkillers, or you take the lottery of securing a Doctor’s appointment for the same outcome. You must also be able to engage the services of either Mystic Meg, (is she still going?) to divine the speed of the other vehicle or call Professor Brian Cox and his large hadron collider mates and have them pause their search for the origin of life and calculate from bent metal and skid marks an impact speed of greater than fifteen miles an hour.
But hang on think about it. The proposed law says this: There shall be a rebuttable presumption that no harm or injury to the claimant has been suffered where…….the collision giving rise to the accident took place at a relative speed of 15 miles per hour or less.
Where in all this is there mention of bikers? It can perhaps be envisaged that the impact between two cars at low speed may not cause injury to the seated, belted and airbagged driver but due to pure physics the effect felt by an exposed rider is obviously massively more forceful.
We must gather now to lobby not only for this to be stopped but at the very least for riders to be excluded.
This draconian and ill thought out proposal will clog up the courts whilst good reputable lawyers try to protect the rights of genuine injured vulnerable honest riders. If they don’t succeed then bad drivers will be free to set cruise control to 14 and play Demolition Derby with gay abandon safe in the knowledge that their insurers will not face a claim for pain.
There will be those who have never had whiplash and think it as real as the man with the white beard presently polishing his sleigh. But it does exist, and for those of us who have had it, it is painful and disruptive and in a civilised society we should compensate those who suffer. We should not be looking at saving a few quid for the shareholders of massive insurance companies at the cost of our pain. How dare the government say or propose under any circumstances that it is now going to be fine to injure voters a little?
Where will it end? Will it be fine to allow employees to fall off unguarded scaffolding so long as it’s just one, two or three metres high? Will it be fine for that kebab to give you food poisoning but not e-coli? Will it be ok for that asbestos to give you chronic pulmonary disease but not mesothelioma? Will it be ok for that defective birth procedure to leave a scar on your child’s face but not brain damage?
Just remember, it could be you.