Whiplash Injury Regulations 2021

Lord Etherton Excerpts

Monday 26th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Etherton (CB) [V]]

The digital portal for whiplash claims will be a completely new portal for small personal injury claims arising from traffic accidents where the pain, suffering and loss of amenity element is under £5,000 and all elements of the claim are less than £10,000. It is specifically designed to enable potential claimants to state their claim and avoid court proceedings without the assistance of legal advice, the idea being that the litigant will simply follow the instructions on the screen. It is likely that very large numbers of claims, running into hundreds of thousands, will be processed through the new whiplash portal.

As the Minister said, the 2018 Act provides for the tariff of damages to be reviewed every three years. He indicated that now, after a year, consideration will be given to whether there should be a review more often than every three years. My focus today is not on that review but rather on the absence of any provision for collecting data on the operation of the digital technology so far as the claimant is concerned and a review of how well it is working.

The whiplash portal and protocol are not part of the court’s digitisation reform programme but arise out of a government policy initiative. I nevertheless urge the Government, as with court digitisation reforms such as the online civil money claims digital process for small money claims by litigants in person, to provide for litigants to record their satisfaction or otherwise with the procedural technology. This is particularly important in the case of the whiplash portal, not only because the litigant is expected to be able to navigate the new digital technology without legal advice but because the technology has been developed not by HMCTS or the MoJ but by the Motor Insurers’ Bureau.

I would, for the same reason, urge the Government to carry out a review of the operation of the new portal within nine months of its commencement, informed by the views expressed by the users of the portal.

Public Health (Coronavirus) (Protection from Eviction) (England) (No. 2) Regulations 2021

Lord Etherton Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Etherton (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to make my maiden speech in this debate and I thank the Minister and other noble Lords for their warm welcome today. That I am in position to make my maiden speech today is due to the support and kindness of many people. Time constraints mean that I can mention only a few by name. I thank, in particular, my supporters, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett; the Lord Convenor and his private secretary, Kate Long, and executive assistant, Daisy Christy; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and Donna Davidson. My thanks go also to the Clerk of the Parliaments, Black Rod and all the staff who have been so helpful to me.

I do not wish to comment directly on the merits of the statutory instrument, as that might be considered to be raising a controversial issue, but as Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice until the beginning of this year, I would like briefly to remind the House of what the judges were doing in relation to residential possession proceedings from the first lockdown in March last year. In that month, I issued a direction requiring a stay of possession proceedings for 90 days. The object was initially to consider how possession actions could proceed appropriately in the pandemic and the lockdown. There were extensions of the stay until September 2020, the final one to enable the courts to consider, once the stay ended, how best to determine the anticipated thousands of residential possession actions that had to be heard. I asked Mr Justice Knowles to chair a unique cross-sector working group to advise on new court procedures in light of the extraordinary conditions. It advised me on a new procedural framework which would, in particular, support vulnerable tenants in the litigation process and encourage compromise and restraint on the part of social landlords, in particular.

Following the ending of the procedural stay, the Government in November 2020 secured the implementation of the first of their three successive statutory instruments restricting the carrying out of evictions by bailiffs. I pay tribute to those judges, overwhelmingly district judges and deputy district judges in the county courts, effectively the civil justice front line, and the members of Sir Robin Knowles’s working group, who have worked and continue to work so hard in seeking to make residential possession proceedings as appropriate as possible in the present, difficult circumstances.