Car insurance premiums could be falling soon
The legal system in Britain currently means that all personal
injury claims have to go through the courts individually. Many
personal injury claims crawl through the courts at a snail’s
pace. The result is lengthy and expensive court costs, and for
every £1 that is given in compensation, it has been estimated
that the legal profession gets 40p. These costs have risen at
such an exponential rate that the British legal profession gets
around £2 billion a year just from playing its part in personal
injury claim court cases.
These costs have to be covered by the insurance companies, and
such is the cost to them that it is estimated that £200 of the
average yearly car insurance premiums is to cover these legal
costs.
It is because of this that the Association of British Insurers
is proposing that personal injury claims should be taken from
the courts, and instead into an independent arbitration system.
This would set compensation payouts for different types of
injuries, and would follow on from a similar system started in
Ireland in 2004. There, legal costs resulting from personal
injury claims have been decreased by 75%.
At the moment, personal injury claims go to court and are
considered individually. If the arbitrator proposed by the ABI
is set up, reference payments for each type of injury would make
a huge difference to the time and effort involved in a court
case. Using the Irish system as an example, a back injury that
recovers within a year is allocated the equivalent of £11,000
and a neck whiplash injury, also recovering within a year, would
receive a compensation payout of the equivalent of £9,400.
Ian Crowder from the AA has pointed out that the new proposals
will take the lawyers out of the loop altogether, resulting in a
massive cut in costs. He added: “There’s no doubt that the
soaring costs of personal injury claims has been a significant
contributor to insurance premium inflation. If they could be
brought under control, premiums could be cut,” something that
would be welcome by all parties.
Well actually, there’s one party that wouldn’t be so pleased:
the British Association of Personal Injury Lawyers. They have
already lodged their objections, based on their belief that the
injured would lose their right to an individual hearing and
payout based on the particulars of the case. They referred to
research they carried out which showed the initial offers by the
insurers to be around 50% of the final compensation agreed. They
also pointed out that 66% of defendants at first denied
liability, which is what led to a court case in the first place.
The legal profession’s objections have not been found to be a
problem in the case of the Irish experience since arbitration
was introduced. Compensation values in Ireland are still at
similar levels to payouts following court cases, with the added
bonus of receiving the payout up to 3 times more quickly, and
with legal costs slashed significantly to a quarter of the
previous cost.
It could be an exciting time - we have seen car insurance
premiums rise and rise over recent years, it’s about time we saw
a fall.
