Personal injury small claims go under the microscope
Regular readers will recall that Legal Eagle has written on this subject before. By way of reminder: at end of March 2020 the government was planning to increase the small claims court limit so that personal injury (PI) claims in general would go into the small claims court system if worth less than £2,000 for the injuries concerned – just now the limit is £1,000. For “whiplash” type injuries a separate limit of £5,000 is to be introduced as opposed to the current £1,000 limit. Will this happen? Maybe not on time it seems. Because of the rise a lot of people with injuries would no longer be able to use solicitors to do their cases. This is because where a claim falls under the small claims court limit the insurance company paying compensation need not pay the legal fees of the person bringing the case. Which means claimants would be on their own in many cases following the rise. And the powers that be accept that people acting without solicitors may run into problems using the computer portal system which processes such cases. So the system needs to be changed to make it more user-friendly but looks like the technology is not going to be ready by the end of March.
Why change the system? One reason is: too many claims; compensation culture etc. So say the Government and the insurance industry from time-totime. (Sorry: Legal Eagle meant to say – “ALL the time”). Helpfully
the Government regularly puts out figures about this kind of thing. On 6 June 2019 the statistics for January to March 2019 inclusive were published. Which show “Unspecified money claims” (UMC) were down 8% to 32,700 cases issued at court. (Such a claim is a claim where you don’t say exactly what the amount of money you want is). UMC type claims include PI claims. The website says the decrease in PI claims alone was 11%. Of course a lot of PI claims don’t get issued at court. They get resolved by negotiation between insurers and claimants instead. But if there is a large decrease in claims that DO get issued at court it follows that the overall number of PI claims also has decreased hugely too. So is the proposal to change the system a non-solution to a nonproblem? Legal Eagle reckons so doing is justified. And will even provide an answer too. Of course the rise in the limit is not needed.