Civil Liability Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2018-09-04
Topic: Law and Crime
Alberto Castrenze Costa (Conservative, Centre-right): At the outset, I refer Members to the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am a practising solicitor in England and I am still on the roll of Scots solicitors I do not practise in the field of personal injury, but I have in the past—in both Scotland and England. I represented "pursuers", as claimants are known in Scotland, and claimants in England. I also represented defendants in England—Her Majesty’s Government, most notably This debate has excited a lot of passions. We heard the shadow Front Bencher make some deeply unwelcome comments about alleged friendships between Government Members and members of the insurance industry. We also hear outside the Simpsons-esque portrayal of ambulance-chasing lawyers—a poor reflection of the vast bulk of solicitors, barristers and other persons, regulated and authorised under the Legal Services Act 2007, who act in this area. We heard the hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens) outline her own valuable experience in this field What is this debate all about? I will concentrate on soft tissue injury—known as whiplash. Whiplash elicits much passion among people and is often undervalued as an injury, and I do not just mean that in the financial sense, in terms of quantum; I mean that it is joked about by members of the public—until, of course, it happens to them and they suffer an accident through no fault of their own, but through the delict, the tort, the negligence of another individual who has breached a duty of care towards them. It is right, moreover, in our mature and well-developed society that when one breaches a duty of care towards another, either through wilful intent or negligence, our system recognises it primarily by way of financial benefit, and that is the primary purpose of a mature and competitive insurance industry Back in February 2017, when I was a member of the Justice Select Committee, I questioned both the then president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers and the director of insurance policy for the Association of British Insurers. I put various questions to both, but in particular to the latter. I asked him whether he linked the number of whiplash claims with the high cost of insurance premiums, and he confirmed that that was the case, but I also asked him to confirm whether the use of the word "epidemic" was right, given that year on year we had seen a decrease in the number of whiplash claims. His response was that the insurance industry did use that word but that so too did others—namely, colleagues in the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers I then asked the director of insurance policy, given that he had accepted a link between the number of whiplash claims and the high level of car insurance premiums, and given the decline in the number of such claims, by what percentage car insurance premiums had declined—what concomitant decline in premiums had been witnessed—and there he stumbled. It was then that he revealed that he did not have an answer for the Committee but that he would write to it subsequently, which he did. When he did, he confirmed that the number of soft tissue injury claims had decreased by 5.8% in 2015-16, but there had been no corresponding decrease in car insurance premiums—in fact, there had been an increase in that year and the following year. The excuse he gave to the Committee was that, as the market cycle started to harden and insurers started to experience inflationary cost pressures from a number of sources, so premiums started to rise again I fully sympathise with Conservative colleagues who want us to do the honourable thing in society by allowing vulnerable people and in particular young people to be able to afford car insurance premiums, and it is right that the Government take every reasonable measure that could lead to a reduction in car insurance premiums, but we need to hold the insurance industry to the assurances it has been giving to the Government.