Claimant solicitors are set to be given unprecedented access to fraud records to root out potentially bogus cases.

Agreement that lawyers acting for claimants should have access to the same information as motor insurers and their representatives follows a ground-breaking meeting between the insurance industry and claimant solicitors on ways to tackle the UK’s annual £350m bill for motor insurance fraud.

The meeting was chaired by the Motor Accident Solicitors Society (MASS).

Under the plan, solicitors will be able to search a client’s claims history when they suspect fraudulent behaviour. This could be done through a web portal run by the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB), which taps into millions of electronic records.

Donna Scully, chair of MASS, said: ‘For too long now the claimant community has been excluded from intelligence on fraud… we felt that a meeting to bring everyone together could be a golden opportunity to try and break down the barriers and proactively work as an industry to combat fraud.’

The bureau’s director, Glen Marr, welcomed further collaboration between claimant and defendant parties and described the sharing of information as ‘a logical and achievable step’.

The IFB is to work on a set of proposals on how the database would work in practice, with further meetings planned for later this year.

Parties represented at the meeting included the Association of British Insurers, insurer Allianz, the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Ministry of Justice, the Law Society, the Forum of Insurance Lawyers, the Claims Standards Council, the police and the National Fraud Authority.