By Sean Kehoe, Senior Partner at personal injury law firm Advance Legal
Research done at the Warwick University School of Law shows that the so-called compensation culture is a myth. For some years, insurance companies PR departments have been diligent in putting out press releases, some real and some exaggerated, to suggest that far more personal injury claims are being brought and for all sorts of weird and wacky things.
In fact, Warwick University research shows that the number of personal injury claims going through the courts has actually fallen rather than risen over recent years. This confirms the view expressed by both MPs and the Government that the compensation culture is a myth.
The researchers wanted to find out whether changes to the management of health and safety at work regulations had had any impact on the number of compensation claims coming from accidents at work. They counted the number of claims brought through the courts between 1999 and 2003 and, contrary to the image in the public’s mind, they found that there has in fact been a dramatic fall in numbers. The number of personal injury claims in the Queens Bench Division of the High Court fell by just over a half from 1187 to 570 in 2003.
In the County Courts the picture was similar. The number of small claims under the heading of negligence – personal injury, fell from 3560 in 1999 to 2210 in 2003. Admittedly, those figures only deal with accident claims that have been brought through the court, rather than settled out of court, but the figures are also backed up from other sources, which show that the number of personal injury claims generally had been dropping.
That conclusion was also reached by the constitutional affairs select committee in the House of Commons which recently observed that alleged fears about health and safety issues have sometimes been used as a ploy by organisations to give them an excuse to ban activities that they don’t want to provide for purely financial reasons. Instead of openly saying so, the cut is blamed on “health and safety”.
One of the Government’s objectives in the Compensation Act was to tackle these perceptions that can lead to a disproportionate fear of personal injury litigation and make people exaggeratedly risk averse.
Although the media have played a part in publicising personal injury claims and criticising claimants, the real source of those stories has been the insurance industry which has been seeking to discourage people from making genuine claims by giving it a stigma. As a result, there have been many genuine injury claims where the victim has not claimed personal injury compensation because they feel ashamed of doing so as if it was somehow anti social. There is no need to feel any stigma. Anyone who has been injured as a result of someone else’s negligence is entitled to bring an accident claim without feeling uneasy about it. Anyone in that position should seek advice from a personal injury lawyer straight away because there is a strict three year dead line for personal injury claims.