The reforms to date represent only a job part-done in building effective fraud resilience into the personal injury claims process, write Deborah Newberry and Martin Stockdale of Kennedys
The whiplash reforms are currently due to go live in May 2021, after numerous delays. Yet significant concerns remain about key issues, including the lack of new rules about the court process and new tariffs. Consequently, practitioners are operating in the dark and any preparation (including training or system adjustments) is having to be based on assumptions. It is, however, anticipated that the new rules will be made available soon.
The Civil Justice Council (CJC) working group has published its recommendations on what further reforms could be introduced for low-value (under £25,000) injury claims. With a focus on resolving meritorious claims more quickly and with the costs reduced, as well as preventing unmeritorious claims, the group concludes that once the pending ‘whiplash reforms’ have been implemented, there should be no further substantive reforms—at least not until the detail of recent measures is clarified.
Where do the concerns lie?
Fraud continues to be one of the main concerns, due in part to the lack of proposed measures on how best to tackle it. While there was consensus that fraud remains a problem and that greater public awareness of the problem is required, beyond this though there continues to be little agreement in how to tackle it.
Where there is no agreement on the problem it follows that there will be little agreement on the solution. We have always described fraud as a behaviour that seeks to benefit from exploiting weaknesses in the claims process that promote expediency and efficiency. Fraud measures are therefore a balance: too onerous and they create friction that increases cost and impacts genuine claims; too lax and fraud thrives.
The reforms to date represent only a job part-done in building effective fraud resilience into the personal injury claims process. We believe that the below recommendations will help to address this:
- More effective data sharing and data processing freedoms for fraud prevention;