Flanagan seeks whiplash review
THE JUSTICE Minister has written to the nation’s most senior judge to ask him for a review of whiplash compensation payments in the near future.
A readjustment of the levels of payout for personal injury claims has long been mooted by the Government but Charlie Flanagan yesterday sent a letter to Chief Justice Frank Clarke asking if it would be possible to begin the review soon.
In the letter, the minister states he is contacting the Chief Justice about how to ‘bring about an interim process’ to review personal injury payouts.
The Government had hoped that soaring insurance premiums could be tackled through the Judicial Council Bill, but its slow passage through the Oireachtas has proved problematic.
The Government has instead opted to press ahead with a review of compensation payout levels in the Book of Quantum, the textbook used to assess compensation for personal injuries.
Mr Flanagan wrote that this interim process would be to address what a Personal Injuries Commission report last September described as being ‘the area which was of most immediate concern… the area of soft tissue/whiplash injuries’. It found that payouts in this area are four times higher in Ireland than in the UK.
This comes just days after Michael D’Arcy, the junior minister tasked with insurance reform, hit out at some compensation payments as being ‘off-the-wall, bananas quantities of money’.
In Mr Flanagan’s letter, he said officials from his department have been in consultation with the Personal Injuries Assessment Board in recent weeks, and award levels set out in the Book of Quantum are contained in ‘one, or possibly two, pages’ of the publication. ‘It would seem therefore that an initial exercise in which these more pressing guideline levels would be reviewed and adjusted as appropriate would be a fairly small-scale and manageable exercise which could be completed quite quickly,’ Mr Flanagan suggests in his letter.
He said the main purpose of his correspondence is ‘to ascertain’ Judge Clarke’s view ‘as to whether it would be possible… to devise a simple process’ in which members of the judiciary could sit down with the PIAB and relevant officials from his department, while ‘clearly respecting at all times the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers’.