What is a personal injury claim?

A personal injury is a legal term to describe physical or psychological harm to your person, as opposed to your property.

People may claim compensation if they are injured as a result of an accident which was not their fault – this is referred to as a personal injury claim. 

The most common types of personal injury claims are for:

• • road traffic accidents (covered by motor insurance)
  • accidents at work  (covered by employers’ liability insurance)
  • accidents on public property or on business premises (covered by public liability insurance)

Whiplash Reform

Fixing a broken system to help millions of motorists

The Civil Liability Act is Government legislation aimed at reducing the cost of motor insurance by modernising the personal injury compensation system in England and Wales.

The reforms have taken some time to introduce since the Act was passed in 2018, but the final stage, which relate to whiplash claims, came into force for accidents occurring on or after 31 May 2021.

During the passage of the Cvili Liability Act, the leaders of 26 insurance companies representing the majority of the UK motor and liability market wrote to the Government committing to passing cost benefits on to customers.

Overall these reforms:

• Introduce a set of tariffs for most whiplash claims resulting from a road traffic accident. These tariffs set in law the amounts of compensation to be paid depending on the duration of the whiplash.
• Introduce a new, online Portal called the Official Injury Claims Portal through which claimants can bring forward a whiplash claims for arising from road traffic accidents. There is no need to use a claimant solicitor should you not wish to and a medical report will be required to prove the claim.
• Remove unnecessary cost from the system so legal advice is only paid for on road traffic accident personal injury claims over the value of £5,000 (rather than £1,000).
• Introduce a ban on seeking or offering to settle whiplash claims without medical evidence of the injury.

Mixed Injuries

Increasingly insurers have been seeing claims for whiplash being brought alongside additional minor injuries. The Civil Liability Act only introduces a set of tariffs for whiplash, or whiplash alongside a minor psychological injury.

The ABI has been helping the industry identify and bring forward a range of test cases on claims with mixed whiplash and minor injuries with the aim of obtaining clarity on how these should be valued from the courts.