Insurance premium high? Blame whiplash, says ABI
Association of British Insurers and AA urge government to curb whiplash claims

The AA has said that the average cost of comprehensive car insurance cover has doubled in the past two years, and that the government needs to act fast to deal with the issue of spurious claims (though that still probably wouldn't make insuring a Noble M600 and an Ariel Atom V8 any cheaper...).
The ABI says that 570,000 people a year now make a claim for whiplash injuries, claims that last year cost British insurers £2bn.
"If whiplash was an Olympic sport, the UK would be gold medallists" says James Dalton, ABI's head of motor and liability. "The fact that whiplash is virtually impossible to disprove means that for too many it has become the fraud of choice, often aided and abetted by ambulance-chasing lawyers and claims management firms."
It does seem as if the government is keen to do something about this, however. Justice secretary Ken Clarke saying: "It is scandalous that we have a system where it is cheaper for insurers to settle a spurious whiplash claim out of court than defend it, creating rocketing insurance premiums for honest drivers."
It is also meeting today (Wednesday) with a group of insurance companies to discuss the possibility of pushing from £1,000 to £5,000 the limit for personal injuries claims, a move which would permit the small claims court to deal with more whiplash cases. The idea is that this would deter some fraudulent claimants from making a case, as more would have to foot the bill for legal costs.
The ABI, meanwhile suggest a more radical approach, calling for a series of measures, including a system where whiplash claimants receive no compensation for alleged pain and suffering (general damages) unless there is objective medical evidence of injury. Capping or reducing the level of damages for whiplash claims. Having a panel of independent doctors to assess whiplash claims, rather than the claimants GP. Greater use of bio-mechanical evidence that might enable the introduction of a speed threshold under which there would be a presumption that whiplash has not occurred (something some countries already do).
Perhaps some big research body can be contracted to do a load of front on and rear on crashes with instrumented dummies and come up with a range of forces needed to make whiplash a likely outcome and then equate these back to impact speed (or rather momentum... change in momentum giving the force is made up of velocity and mass).
In the end people just need to stop being complete t

Car insurance now just seems to be on the list of the many things that now simply don't represent good value for money & play on the fact that it is needed & so they can charge what they want knowing that people will still have to buy it. Also the standard fine for anyone caught without insurance should be double what their premium would be. Seems crazy to me that it's cheaper for people to get caught and pay a fine rather than actually get insurance.
I get confused with the premiums though. I once had quotes from the same insurer where the quote for a declared 600 bhp Skyline was £25 more expensive than their quote for an Audi 1.9 diesel estate. Drove me mad trying to work out how they had calculated it. Audi was worth 1/3 of the Skyline too!
My brother was rear ended while turning into a pub car park, he never contacted anyone but his insurance company to report he had been in an accident, the next day he had claim advisor asking if he had any pains in which he said he had a sore neck for a day, they processed the claim automatically and he was sent a cheque a few months later for £600, a friend was also in the car and they were trying to get contact details to contact him so they could submit a claim for him, but he asked my brother not to give his details. I wonder how much the claim company got. He still gets phone and text messages two years later asking if he had any accidents.
So it's either the insurance company to blame or these claim advisors!
It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't the insurance companies owning these claim advisor companies so they can have an excuse to put insurance premiums up. How much do they actually pay out? against how much they make for increasing insurance premiums year on year?
Sounds like fraud to me!
if the government request we have insurance, we should all pay into a government insurance policy and be done with rip off insurance.
He had claims companies ringing him everyday saying they could get him £2.5k for an event that only cost him a days work which was £120. He was pissed off the police had passed all his info on.
He had people down the pub saying f

He politely told them all to f

His explanation was 'A: Im British and B: Im not letting my morals drop down to scum levels'
I'm proud of him!!

Now thankfully the Impreza was insured (unsure if it was stolen of the scumbag driving was the owner) so left it to the company who said they would pay out the cost of the car. Now, my brother is ok but he's now without a car and has to go through the process of finding another like the one he had. Coupled with that, his premiums are now likely to go up for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time meaning it's going to cost him in the long run. He isn't going to claim for whiplash (he did get taken to A&E by the cops for shock on the night in question) but you can imagine that's why some people claim like this. You can have years of careful driving screwed up in an instant by some bellend and have to pay through the nose for it. It's about time that insurers looked after the victims of accidents like this rather than just paying out the bare minimum they can get away with.
I also have a problem with compensation in general. There is nothing wrong with claiming for genuine time off work, or other out-of-pocket expenses, but money isn't going to ease the pain, that's what medical treatment is for, and you get that for "free" on the NHS.
'Crumple zones' don't really work and these new fangled painted plastic bumpers as pioneered by the ECOTY 1978 winner, the Porsche 928 transmit even more of the energy from impacts through to the passenger cell?
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