Letters roundup: 10 May 2024

Insurers must be held accountable

Time and time again, we are seeing insurers look for creative ways to minimise payouts for claims.

Recent reports show that the cost of car insurance in the UK rose by a third last year, with insurers blaming this rise on the increase in payouts for injuries.

Our own research at National Accident Helpline reveals there has been no increase in non-whiplash claims; whiplash claims themselves have been decimated. RTA claims are actually decreasing. Premiums should be falling, yet instead they are soaring.  

And now we are seeing similar behaviour around the laws governing autonomous vehicles. Currently, claimants injured by autonomous vehicles can claim against insurers under section 2 of the Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018, when the vehicle is driving itself.

Without this, claimants would have to prove their claim against the manufacturer as a product liability claim. These are fiendishly complex, time-consuming and expensive actions.

However, the law as it stands still leaves the claimant in the invidious position of having to prove that the vehicle was being driven autonomously, when that information is solely in the defendant’s possession. Therefore, the difficulty of proving this will only add more strain to the claims process – a process that is already deterring many.

What we need is reform, something that the current shadow transport minister, Bill Esterson, is suggesting through an amendment referred to as NC6.

This would provide strict liability cover for such claims, meaning claimants would not need to prove that such vehicles were driving themselves.

The introduction of this amendment is one that the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers and National Accident Helpline strongly support. We need to guarantee that insurers are held accountable, not only to tackle convoluted claims processes, but to ensure that claimants who are entitled to compensation to rebuild their lives can and will be compensated.

John Kushnick

Legal operations director, National Accident Helpline

Bar watchdog’s performance is improving

On 26 April the Gazette published an article by Catherine Baksi setting out her views of the recent review by leading law firm Fieldfisher of the Bar Standards Board’s enforcement processes and policies. She alleged that the review had found that we were doing ‘a pretty poor job’. What Fieldfisher actually said was: ‘The enforcement procedure adopted by the BSB is in line with professional models used in professional regulation elsewhere, fundamentally the approach is appropriate, but we conclude that there is a large number of areas on which both the BSB and BTAS can focus to improve their enforcement remits.’

Fieldfisher also recognised the commitment of the BSB’s hard-working people. Our independent reviewers, who audit a sample of decisions every quarter, consistently give us high marks and our decisions and processes are very rarely successfully challenged in court.  

It seems strange to equate getting decisions right to doing a poor job. We will never sacrifice quality for speed.

While the quality of our decision-making must remain paramount, we are determined to improve its timeliness. So we welcome the fact that Fieldfisher recommends a combination of reforms – to accountabilities, our communications, our knowledge management, our rules and processes, and to the supporting IT. That is precisely why we employed them because improving timeliness has been and remains the board’s top priority. The board has accepted Fieldfisher’s recommendations in principle.

We shall implement these changes as fast as we can. Meanwhile, we are also adopting a new, more balanced scorecard which will ensure we are better able to monitor not just the speed, but also the quality of our decisions, as well as our productivity and the responsiveness of our service.  

Our clear aim is to accelerate the handling of enforcement work. That will be reflected in many cases being completed more quickly. But there will always be a minority of complex and contested cases that take longer than the average. Our performance targets reflect that reality and are in line with those set by other regulators. They are not a norm and nor are they set in stone. We will keep all our targets under review.

Ms Baksi also suggested that the LSB had ‘failed’ us in its review of our regulatory performance giving us a ‘red traffic light rating’. That is not their rating of our performance this year and our performance figures for timeliness have also increased significantly since then.  Our productivity has also increased.

It is a shame that Ms Baksi uses figures that are now a year old and an out-of-date report to make her argument. She gives us no credit for commissioning a report into our systems, and then being very open about its findings, all of which we intend to accept. If she really wants to know what progress we are making, she is very welcome to attend our board meetings where our performance is regularly discussed in public session.

Mark Neale

Director general, Bar Standards Board

Uninformed on reform

Delaying the implementation of fixed recoverable costs in lower-value clinical negligence cases was inevitable. It is, however, baffling that ministers did not announce it sooner (‘Fixed costs in clinical negligence claims set for October’, 29 April).

Lawyers have accepted the reforms are coming; they just want adequate time to prepare so that they can continue to deliver the best outcomes for vulnerable clients.

They cannot prepare without more information, including details of the pre-action protocol which is apparently yet to be written so was hardly likely to be implemented this month.

Clinical negligence is a complex area. Lawyers do an enormous amount of due diligence at the outset to weed out unmeritorious and spurious cases. They do not get the recognition for this that they should.  

Instead of reading about the reforms being delayed in meeting minutes, they should be kept informed at every stage.

Qamar Anwar

Managing director, First4Lawyers, Huddersfield