Thomas Mitchell just isn’t satisfied by a giant decline in the variety of claims
The variety of private damage claims made following highway visitors collisions is in sharp decline.
Data from the authorities’s Compensation Recovery Unit (CRU) revealed that solely 63,833 claims had been registered with the CRU in the fourth quarter of 2025. This is down 24 per cent on the yr earlier than. Since 2018, the image turns into even starker, with a 58 per cent total drop in declare numbers.
Ministers and authorities officers have heralded these figures as a victory. However, while you evaluate the knowledge from the CRU with knowledge from the Department for Transport’s annual report, the variety of folks being injured on UK roads is on the rise. Between 2020 and 2023, accidents from highway visitors collisions elevated by 15 per cent.
So, what is occurring right here?
In England, 2021 noticed the introduction of the so-called ‘Whiplash Reforms’, a set compensation tariff for minor highway visitors accidents. The scheme restricted compensation quantities and authorized charges recoverable by attorneys representing folks concerned in a collision.
The reforms minimised compensation claims to a process-driven, cost-counting train, introducing an internet portal and a “computer says no” method to coping with victims’ claims.
The reforms had been launched as a cloaked insurance coverage lobby-backed assault on attorneys who symbolize victims of highway visitors accidents. Before you begin to assume that whiplash claims are trumped up and other people intentionally exaggerate damage signs to get extra compensation, I’m right here to dispel that myth.
The solely benefit of the whiplash reforms was to motorized vehicle insurers. That benefit got here in the type of a deficit in entry to justice, which is borne out by the figures above. Since the reforms have are available, highway traffic-related private damage claims have seen that sharp drop off, however that’s not as a result of the roads are safer, it’s as a result of the reforms make it very troublesome for victims to make a declare as a result of the nature of the reforms and the way they had been crafted.
In any case, with decrease claims numbers, you’d assume that the price of claims would come down, and in flip, insurers would go these price financial savings onto their clients.
Guess once more. Insurance premiums stay excessive, with the common automobile insurance coverage coverage in the UK now £726 in accordance with Confused.com.
In my previous Scotsman article, I wrote about the authorities’s Motor Insurance Taskforce whose remit it was to handle this situation. Instead, the taskforce’s findings had been toothless, they usually selected to not intervene with premium costs. The outcome? Insurance Industry 1, Insurance clients 0.
Thankfully, no such reforms are to be launched up right here in Scotland, but when it was mooted, there can be actual opposition from these of us who symbolize victims.
The myth of a “compensation culture” is simply that, a myth.
Insurance corporations need you to consider it exists as a result of it justifies them charging you a lot simply to insure your car.
Any shopper I’ve had when confronted with the query of “would you rather the accident had never happened or would you rather you received compensation”, the reply is all the time the identical. They all the time want the accident had by no means occurred. And that’s the reason compensation culture is a myth.
