The
Association of British Insurers seems to have a habit of inviting
confrontation.
Insurers
got pretty well all they asked for from the government in relation to
reductions in the amounts of legal costs recoverable by victims. An independent
report from the Parliamentary Select Committee On Whiplash injuries strongly criticised
the overly close relationship between insurance companies and the conservative
led coalition government –
Despite
this, the attacks on victims go on and on. Their policy spokesman, Rob
Cummings, said this week that there was a ‘whiplash epidemic’. The
parliamentary committee found in fact, that the numbers of claims were
reducing. This rhetoric suggests that claims are fraudulent even
though the ABI could not provide the parliamentary committee with any evidence of the scale of
the ‘problem’. The truth is that only a tiny percentage of claims are
fraudulent and they damage all of us who are involved in civil justice. We all want to
see an end to them, but this is not achieved by these blanket attacks on
claimant lawyers.
Mr Cummings
then showed an alarming ignorance of the impact of recent reforms on access to
justice. He said that there was no evidence that justice for ‘genuinely’
injured claimants was impeded (why the constant suggestion that the genuine are
somehow a minority?).
Interestingly
the President of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) suggests the
opposite. Writing in the March edition of APIL’s PI Focus magazine Matthew
Stockwell talks about ‘institutionalised’ cherry picking. What he means is that
the new costs regime makes it commercially unviable for lawyers to take on risky cases,
especially those with a lower value. Now that a chunk of the legal costs has to
come from damages lawyers can only afford to take on those which will provide
some return. He warns that many ‘genuine’ claimants are now at risk of falling
into a ‘justice gap’. I bet the ABI won’t complain about that.
Matthew is
right. We are seeing firm after firm decide that personal injury work is no
longer viable. They are either closing or selling their work to other firms. I have
no doubt that this will lead to a further reduction in the numbers of cases. This
is the reality and it is happening as we speak.
This time
next year; we will still hear insurers banging on about a compensation culture.
But there will certainly be fewer lawyers for them to target..
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