After the summer recess which finishes on 4th September, Parliament will hear the second reading of the Government’s Civil Liability Bill. Whatever the intention of the bill, if it is passed as currently drawn, people who are injured in Road Traffic Accidents and who suffer soft tissue injuries (not fractures or scarring injuries) that do not have a value of £5000 or more will not be able to recover their legal costs of pursuing a claim.
In many cases, the legal fees involved might be as much as the compensation amount, so the innocent victims of bad driving will have to take on the Insurance Companies and their hired solicitors alone in what is acknowledged to be a complex area of law.
Effectively, thousands of people will be denied their right to Justice as they will have to take on organisations that make millions of pounds of profits per year (for example Direct Line’s operating profits of £354.2 million in 2017) without the assistance of experienced legal experts. If the Bill becomes law, those profits will probably increase substantially.
What would this impact look like?
One such client of ours who would have had the choice of claiming against insurers himself or not pursuing the case would have lost out by over £9000 if the Act had been in force at the time of his accident in July 2015.
He was a passenger in a car that was travelling on the M1 motorway near Sheffield when the driver ran into a stationary vehicle. Within seconds, there was a second collision when a lorry ran into the back of the car. Both impacts caused very significant soft tissue injuries to our client who was fortunate not to have been seriously injured. The injuries sadly prevented him from taking up an offer of work from which he would have earned over £5000.
The car driver’s insurers admitted liability and we arranged for our client, at no cost to him, to undergo physiotherapy for the multiple soft tissue injuries he suffered to different parts of his body. After his treatment finished, we obtained medical reports from two different specialist doctors. Settlement negotiations broke down after the said insurers refused to make a reasonable offer, so we started Court Proceedings on behalf of our client.
After that happened, the insurers brought a Part 20 claim in the same action against the lorry driver and his insurers, claiming that most of the client’s injuries were caused by the second collision. Our client then had to join the lorry driver and his insurers into the proceedings as the Second Defendant. The solicitors for the lorry driver indicated that they might be joining the insurers of the stationary car as yet another party to the proceedings as they alleged that the driver was responsible for it stopping, either due to poor maintenance or by not putting enough fuel in the tank.
The case could easily have become a procedural nightmare for a solicitor, let alone our client, who, like most individuals, would not have been able to pursue the matter himself had the Civil Liability Bill been on the Statute books. He would probably have given up long before that stage and have received nothing at all.
Fortunately, we negotiated a settlement and he will receive over £9,000 in total, most being compensation for lost earnings and the cost of medical treatment.
We are campaigning hard against the Bill and will soon be meeting with several local MPs to ask them to oppose what could be one of the most unjust and unfair Acts of Parliament in a generation. We hope you will help us and contact your own MP who can be located at httpss://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/mps/
Please also follow and support online campaigns at @ccesstojustice and #RepairTheRightBody and elsewhere.
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