ABI need for speedier injury claims
The insurance industry has called again for the government to consider the creation of a faster system for settling injury claims">injury claims as they have called for changes in the current injury claims system the year previously.
The Association of British Insurers (also known as the ABI) believes that the current claims system in place in the UK is weighed down by high legal fees and is very slow.
The Association of the British Insurers believe that if new proposals were made earlier and implemented then the claims being pursued could have been settled much faster than it is currently.
The ABI (the Association of British Insurers) said that the average motor vehicle accident personal injury claim usually takes around seven hundred and thirty days to settle.
Stephen Hadrill, who is the current director general of the Association of British Insurers (ABI), said that many workplace injury claims can take up to around three years to settle. He also said that:
"What tends to happen is that a person who has been injured goes to a lawyer who does a vast amount of research, often unnecessarily in our opinion, before putting the claim anywhere near the insurer, there is then a process of negotiation over liability and settlement in a very adversarial system."
There were around 250,000 personal injury claims last year that were associated with car crashes, with an estimated 80% of them being non-contentious.
The ABI believes that nearly all of the claims made this year could have been dealt with more efficiently and they could have been dealt with in a quarter of the current time it takes to deal with a injury claim.
A year ago the government had suggested that a new time scale should be introduced for such claims. Under their suggested proposal, lawyers would have five days after being contacted by a claimant to let insurers know that a claim might be made. Insurers would then have 15 days for a motor claim and 30 days for a workplace or public liability claim to decide whether they were going to settle the matter or not.
And if a settlement could not be agreed, then the case would go to a district judge for a decision.
Mr Hadrill said this would be very much to the benefit of claimants. As he said:
"The guy who has been injured is kind of encouraged to stay off work, doesn't get back to work so quickly, possibly ends up on incapacity benefit, and the whole system fails him,"
The ABI's call for the government to make reforms in injury claims have been supported by employer's organisation the CBI, and Citizens Advice Bureau.
Updated on 6/27/2008