Civil Liability Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-05-10
Topic: Mixed Topics
Elizabeth Rose Berridge (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 8, 10 and 49A in this group. I join with the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Primarolo, in relation to genuine claimants. As I understand it, even the insurance companies accept that the majority of claimants in this area are genuine. It is a high burden on your Lordships’ House to ensure that the Bill hits the target of fraudulent claims as accurately as it can without the shrapnel hitting genuine claimants. Fundamentally, someone with a bruised knee, as the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, mentioned, may find themselves with more compensation when assessed under Judicial College guidelines than someone who has genuinely incurred a potentially six-month whiplash injury Amendments 8 and 10 relate to reducing the length of the period of these symptoms from two years to one. It is important to remember that while, yes, there is a portal, which the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, referred to, and the small claims track, even today 35% of claims are outside the portal. These are the nuts and bolts of people’s access to justice through the small claims track, but that is without legal representation The important reason to reduce the scope of the Bill to a year is that the overwhelming majority of whiplash cases, even including those that the insurance companies maintain today are fraud or suspected fraud, are resolved within a year. However, a bulk of cases—15%—last longer than that, and of those there are about 5% where someone has a long-standing chronic condition as a result of the whiplash injury. They might have an early onset of osteoarthritis, a chronic pain condition or fibromyalgia—these are cases that I have seen—which are seriously long-term disabling conditions. It is very important for those people that there is representation, perhaps more in-depth medical reports looking at what has happened to their symptoms, and legal advice so that they are not pressurised into settling a claim too early and getting a sum of money within the first year when actually the prognosis is not definite. If we reduce the scope of the Bill—the Government’s stated intention relates to minor injuries and fraud—down to one year, it would give protection to those people who, hopefully, if they were advised properly, would wait to settle their claim to ensure that their symptoms had resolved I hope this is not going to be a complicated amendment. It would do a lot to protect genuine claimants. We do not seem to have evidence of people who are exaggerating and claiming to have fibromyalgia, chronic pain or early-onset osteoarthritis as the result of a fraudulent claim. At the moment the Bill does not do sufficient to protect claimants in those categories, and reducing the limit from two years to one would deal with the fraud problem but also give them some protection Amendment 49A is one that I was given advice on by USDAW. The policy reason that Her Majesty’s Government have given for creating this section of claims is that we are aiming at fraud where they will not be covered by the Judicial College guidelines. That will lead to ordinary people not necessarily understanding why claim X merited much more than their own claim. This is serious in people’s fundamental understanding of compensation and justice.