Insurance Industry: Whiplash

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

The noble Lord, with his experience as a neurologist, highlights the complicated nature of this injury and the fact that it is not usually detectable on scans. He also made the point about pre-existing degenerative injury. The effort to achieve some sort of consensus among medical experts has been helped by the MedCo portal. It is remarkable how many of the reports now have a more favourable prognosis than used to be the case before it was introduced.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

I declare my interests as set out in the register. Will my noble friend the Minister accept that there is serious concern not only in this House but also in the insurance industry at the way in which we have allowed a situation where 80% of all personal injury claims are said to be whiplash claims? Will he find some way of stopping these cold calls? One of my colleagues just had a cold call from a claims management company calling itself the “Department of Compensation”. Will my noble friend please get across to everyone that these people are potentially committing a very serious criminal offence?

[Lord Faulks]

My noble friend is, of course, absolutely right. The Government are determined to stamp down on this. Legislation is already in place, primarily enforced by the Information Commissioner’s Office. The Government have recently consulted on bringing forward secondary legislation to require all direct marketing callers to provide their calling line identification. Individuals can have a Telephone Preference Service installed on their telephones and we are also exploring the possibility of call-blocking devices for vulnerable consumers.

When somebody rings me, as they do from time to time, inviting me to take part in a fraud, I endeavour to extract details from them without revealing the position I hold. Unfortunately, my voice appears to cause them only to put down the phone.