Prisons and Courts Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Nick Thomas-Symonds and Suella Braverman

Committee Debate: 2nd Sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

Q You just made a statement about 70,000 cases of detected fraud and you cannot even tell me how many of those are actually proven before the courts?

James Dalton: No.

[Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)]

Q I have defended parties in low-velocity impact claims, and the guidance is generally set out when an allegation of fraud is going to form part of a defence; it is set out in the Court of Appeal guidance for Casey v. Cartwright. What do you think is the problem with that guidance and how will these proposals assist? It imposes a burden on the defendant to notify that fraud will be part of the defence and, importantly, in many cases it will allow them to adduce medical evidence on the issue of causation.

James Dalton: There are a number of tools at insurers’ disposal to address the type of cases that we have just been discussing. Whether insurers choose to use them is obviously a decision for them and, as I said, Rob might be able to explain what Aviva’s position is.

However, the Government have recognised that fraud is a big problem in insurance. They established an insurance fraud taskforce, which has reported and made a number of recommendations for reform. The Government have delivered. For example, there is now a fundamental dishonesty action that insurers can plead in court, so that those claims that are so flagrantly fraudulent are kicked out of the system. We need those tools and we are using them to get rid of fraud from the system.

Rob Townend: It is a good question; I will answer two questions together. We started defending claims at Aviva a couple of years ago. We stood back and said, “Look, we’re not going to back away quickly. We are going to trust the courts to support us,” and we took a defence excellence strategy on behalf of our customers. If they are saying, “There wasn’t anybody injured. I might have been liable, but the speed of the accident didn’t cause injury,” we have been defending our customers through the courts for the last couple of years. I think we have put 1,700 through the courts; we have a success rate of something like 70%. More recently, we have had great success with fundamental dishonesty and the judges are generally starting to support us. I think we have had 174 cases where we have had fundamental dishonesty.

If we go to the other gentleman’s comment about fraud, we do not pay one in 10 of our whiplash claims. Some of that disappears when we challenge it. I invest millions of pounds in investigation analytics capability technology and we will challenge plaintiffs at the first point where we think the claim is linked to a gang and is spurious. We do not pay one in 10 of our whiplash claims at Aviva.