RE: Insurance premium high? Blame whiplash, says ABI
RE: Insurance premium high? Blame whiplash, says ABI
Wednesday 2nd May 2012

Insurance premium high? Blame whiplash, says ABI

Association of British Insurers and AA urge government to curb whiplash claims



Whiplash claims are costing the average motorist £90 per year in insurance premiums, according to the Association of British Insurers (ABI), contributing to a near doubling in the cost of car insurance.

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).

Author
Discussion

MIP1983

Original Poster:

210 posts

222 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
I'm suprised there isn't a technological solution. Brain activity is somthing we can monitor with electrodes on the scalp. Is it overly simplistic to think that you can test if somone is really experiencing pain by monitoring which part of the brain is lighting up with activity when they move their head in such a way they claim is painful?

Otispunkmeyer

13,384 posts

172 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
MIP1983 said:
I'm suprised there isn't a technological solution. Brain activity is somthing we can monitor with electrodes on the scalp. Is it overly simplistic to think that you can test if somone is really experiencing pain by monitoring which part of the brain is lighting up with activity when they move their head in such a way they claim is painful?
You'd maybe have to have one of those CT brain scans in the MRI machine.... thats probably not gonna be cheap either.

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 tts and just man up a little... but thats not going to happen.

dublet

283 posts

228 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
I'm sure that once the amount of claims go down, so will the premiums. Right, ABI?

Vantagefan

643 posts

187 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
Doesn't surprise me. I had a little ding a while back and despite both of us being well enough to drive half a mile to the Tesco car park to exchange details safely and without obstructing the road the lovely old gent I hit claimed for whiplash and shock.

robinessex

11,638 posts

198 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
Had bump on Saturday night. Wife suffered bruising from the seat belt. 8hrs in A&E to check her out. Left with a precription for pain killers. In agony for two days, now getting better. Cost me the promise of a new Kitchen not to claim of my insurance !!! Not a cheap get out!!!

montyvr6

93 posts

201 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
Insurance will always go up as cars get more expensive & there are more of them to crash into each other. My annoyance is the recent rate that it & everything else has shot up.

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!

willcorke

3 posts

270 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
I fell off my chair when I read this story: £90 on every policy! 570,00 claims!

Hurt my neck when I fell. You'll be hearing from my lawyer.

driftingphil

140 posts

164 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
It's not the people that have the accidents to blame it, somehow these claim company automatically have your address and contact number after an accident, who else would contact them if it wasn't your insurance company releasing your details.

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.

Edited by driftingphil on Wednesday 2nd May 15:30

HonestIago

1,719 posts

203 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
montyvr6 said:
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!
For real?! eek

rocketride

141 posts

179 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
A friend of mine was in an accident and had whiplash and a day off work.

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 fk em, you should claim, get the money bla bla bla. You could buy this and that etc.. It was like everyone had been brain washed into claiming.

He politely told them all to fk off.

His explanation was 'A: Im British and B: Im not letting my morals drop down to scum levels'

I'm proud of him!!


Tib

458 posts

196 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
dublet said:
I'm sure that once the amount of claims go down, so will the premiums. Right, ABI?
This.

PaulMoor

3,209 posts

180 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
HonestIago said:
montyvr6 said:
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!
For real?! eek
A 600bhp Skyline (not likely to be owned by someone who uses it to trudge to work every day and resents the concept of driving) is probably much less likely to be crashed or stolen than the Audi (which is more likely to be keeped on the road, more likely to be treated as a tool than something to look after and love). That's probably the reason for the small diffrence. Also I would guess the avearge Skyline owner will put hours in to cleaning up any scuffs and dings from carparks and the like where as most owners of Audi estates will just call the insurance company and get them to fix it.

Crow555

1,037 posts

211 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
Last week, my brother was heading to his girlfriends and was stopped at a junction by a traffic cop who put a few cones on the road and said the road was closed temporarily. Next thing, a Subaru Impreza appears up the road, is stingered and the scrote driving tried to make up the junction my brother was waiting in. Obviously 4 flat tires aren't going to be effective and ran into my brother's civic, taking out the passenger door and the front wing and suspension set.

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.

School boy

1,006 posts

228 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
Still doesn't explain why we probably have the most expensive inurance in the world when Americans can drive V8's at 16. Don't tell me they don't have a blame claim culture.

Edited by School boy on Wednesday 2nd May 16:14

Crow555

1,037 posts

211 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
School boy said:
Still doesn't explain why we probably have the most expensive inurance in the world when Americans can drive V8's at 16. Don't tell me they don't have a blame claim colture.
I don't think 90210 is a factual programme.

davidsc

325 posts

169 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
Just ban whiplash claims. It's easy.

abbotsmike

1,033 posts

162 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
I think the big problem with injury claims is that it's up to the insurance to prove the claimant is NOT injured, rather than it being up to the claimant to prove they ARE injured. Until the rules are shifted (or the insurance companies grow spines and just say no) then it will carry on, as it's often very difficult and expensive, if not impossible, to prove a negative!

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.

carinaman

23,388 posts

189 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
People are now surviving accidents that would have killed them if they had them in the cars of the 60s and 70s?

'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?

MiseryStreak

2,929 posts

224 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
So that's about 560,000 people who need to get a proper whiplashing.

Mark-C

6,739 posts

222 months

Wednesday 2nd May 2012
quotequote all
davidsc said:
Just ban whiplash claims. It's easy.
So they'll claim for "shock" or "stress" ....

The ABI have a role to play in this as well - they started the habit of settling the claims without much in the way of questions