Picture
this: you’ve just parked your car, perfectly legally, outside a shop.
You’ve just unclipped your seatbelt, and you’re about to open the passenger
door to climb out of the vehicle, when a car shunts you from behind.
It
turns out that the driver picked up his phone to take a call, and lost control
of his vehicle. Thankfully, he was only travelling at about 10mph, so the
impact wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But still, your body has been given
quite a jolt. Fortunately you weren’t thrown through the windscreen, and yet
more mercifully, nothing is broken. But within minutes of the incident your
neck is hurting, and the following day it is worse. In fact, it hurts like
hell, making your day-to-day activities thoroughly miserable. You struggle to
turn your neck and move comfortably, so much so that you have to take time off
work. Your car isn’t looking too pretty, either.
The
injury takes a few weeks to settle down. Your doctor advises you that you’ve
sustained whiplash. You’re self-employed, and have lost income as a consequence
of another driver’s negligence. You don’t believe in what the government calls
‘compensation culture’ but you can’t help but feel fairly hard done by, so you
go and see a specialist personal injury solicitor. This is what he says:
“I’m
terribly sorry but there’s nothing I can do. For starters, you would need to
see a panel of doctors and ensure that they agreed you’re suffering from
whiplash, rather than just your own GP. This will make for delay, but in fact
your claim doesn’t even get off the ground. This is because the vehicle which
hit your car was travelling at under 15mph. Thanks to changes brought in by
David Cameron, claims for whiplash injuries have become difficult per se
– and impossible unless the incident happened at a speed of 15mph or over.”
To
all right-thinking people, the above scenario will seem unfair and, indeed,
absurd. However, it will come to pass if proposals announced yesterday by David
Cameron to tackle ‘compensation culture’ are implemented. Making whiplash
victims see a panel of medical experts and forcing their lawyers to incur extra
costs in proving that an accident occurred at 15mph or over are precisely what
the Prime Minister thinks should happen, following statements made at a summit
of insurers at Downing Street yesterday.
Mr
Cameron’s argument is that Britain’s reputation as ‘the whiplash capital of
Europe’ forces insurers to raise their premiums, which, in turn, hits the
wallets of the taxpayer. There are a number of flaws with this, not least the
fact that medical understanding of whiplash is evolving rapidly and pointing
squarely towards the fact that it is a genuine and debilitating condition.
Moreover, what evidence is there to suggest that insurers will reduce premiums
if the proposals are implemented? There is also considerable doubt that, all
things considered, premiums are actually rising, least of all as a result of
whiplash claims.
But
perhaps the most insulting aspect of the Prime Minister’s proposals lies in
their emphasis on the welfare of big business rather than the victim. To Mr
Cameron, it is preferable to look after huge and wealthy insurance companies –
and their shareholders – rather than think through the impact on the lives of
people who suffer an injury such as that which I outlined above.
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