Civil Liability Bill [Lords]

Ruth Cadbury Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 4th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

These matters are governed by regulation and we are proceeding on that basis.

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mr Gauke]

I want to make some progress.

I am aware that there has been concern on both sides of the House about the inclusion of vulnerable road users—for example, cyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists —in the proposed small claims track rise. I am grateful to Members for signalling in their arguments how such road users may be disproportionately affected by this measure.

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[Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens). She mentioned that she has a history of involvement in this area. I would like to state at the outset that it is important to recognise that there are many personal injury lawyers who do a good job. Over the years, I have had quite a lot to do with personal injury lawyers in my capacity as a constituency MP, as well as in relation to a fatality involving my own family. I am happy to state that there are very, very good people out there doing the work of personal injury lawyers. As in perhaps every professional domain there are good, there are bad and there are the indifferent—and there are snakes. I do not think we should let this debate pass without recording that there are some very good people out there doing important work in the area of personal injury litigation.

It is also important to recognise—we have not heard anything from the Opposition on this—that there has been a significant rise in the compensation culture. I do not think that personal injury litigation lawyers—at least, not all of them—are tools of Satan. I have met one or two who have come close to that description, but listening to the Opposition one might get the idea that all insurance companies are tools of Satan. In fact, they are nothing of the kind. They are an enormously important and worldwide British success story. They manage huge amounts of funds through premium income, which pay many people’s pensions, including the pensions of many people represented by Opposition Members as well as by the rest of this House. A bit of balance on the nature of the problems facing insurance companies and the measures they have taken to tackle them would have been in order. I am afraid we heard nothing along those lines.

I strongly support the Bill. If I have one criticism it is that it is very overdue. I had a meeting with the head of fraud at Aviva—known to old fashioned people as Norwich Union—which is a big employer in East Anglia and of my constituents. In 2006, it set up the Insurance Fraud Bureau because it was so concerned about the scale of what are called induced car crashes—“crash for cash” was the popular phrase. On 16 January 2007, I held a debate in Westminster Hall on this very subject. In preparation for this debate, I glanced at it to see what I had said and to remind myself of some of the facts. Norwich Union’s 2005 report “Shedding Light on Hidden Crime” pointed out that the scale of fraud was growing at a very high rate—I won’t say it was exponential in case there are any mathematicians here to correct me—and that the proceeds from induced car accidents were routinely being used to fund other forms of organised crime, including drugs, people trafficking, benefits and credit card fraud, and money laundering.

The report estimated that between 1999 and the publication of the report in 2005 there had been 22,605 staged or induced car accidents. It broke them down city by city. At the top was Blackburn, with 1,710 staged accidents between 1999 and 2005. That was perhaps the reason that Jack Straw, who many of us remember fondly in this House and who was the MP for Blackburn, took a great interest in induced car crashes and fraudulent claims for whiplash injury. It took six or seven years to generate 22,605 induced accidents. Eleven years ago, the Insurance Fraud Bureau estimated that the rate of growth would mean a further 20,000 induced car crashes in the next 18 months. We heard the Secretary of State say that there are now 70,000 fraudulent claims for whiplash every year, so it has grown much, much more since this phenomenon became more publicly discussed 10 or 12 years ago. Just as it was then, it continues to be a direct threat to public safety.

[Ruth Cadbury]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Bacon]

I will not, because I know there is a time limit and other Members wish to speak. I hope the hon. Lady will forgive me.

The Bill is very welcome. We need to be clear that the insurance companies have done a great deal and want to do more to try to tackle this problem. They said at the time that one of their main concerns was the rise in the cost of premiums for honest motorists. That continues to be a major concern. The fundamental problem, which I do not think I really heard the Opposition address but which the Government certainly did, is that road traffic accidents as a whole have been going down but personal injury claims have been going up. There is obviously something fundamentally wrong, and I am glad that the Bill is beginning to address it.

I shall comment in passing, in the Minister’s hearing, on two other issues that the Secretary of State referred to and which I strongly welcome. One is excluding vulnerable road users, such as cyclists—a welcome move. By the way, on what the hon. Member for Cardiff Central said, I should say that I support stronger moves against claims management companies. I had a phone call from one last week, talking about my accident on 26 January last year, of which of course I had no knowledge whatever. I am up for telling them where to go and for an argument with them at times—as many of us would be, probably—but my concern is that they prey on the vulnerable and deceive people who are not necessarily as robust as most of us in this House would be in such circumstances.

The second issue is about the proposal for a longer period of implementation for the IT system, which was a very welcome announcement from the Secretary of State. I sat on the Public Accounts Committee for 16 years and heard more stories about failed IT systems than about any other subject. The biggest red flag in relation to the putative or prospective failure of an IT system was the compression of the testing timetable. I am glad that the Government have recognised that.

Let us be clear: reform is needed. The Bill makes a proper link between whiplash claims and medical evidence, and that is long overdue. It provides a fixed tariff, which is fair and reasonable in the circumstances, given what has happened in recent years. There will be the possibility of an uplift and there will be flexibility. The tariff is perhaps unfortunate, but I think it necessary. Given what the Secretary of State said as a Treasury Minister about the independence of the Lord Chancellor, I do not have any fears on that score, as Opposition Members appear to.

I hope the Bill will go some way towards addressing my biggest concern: young people in rural areas who need a car to get to work. I represent a very large rural constituency of more than 300 square miles. Twenty or 30 years ago, car insurance premiums were higher for younger people, but they were not a “thing”—they were not so high that it became almost impossible for young people to get on the road. They were not more expensive than the car itself. That is no longer the case. The cost is hugely prohibitive and a direct result of the rise in the compensation culture, which has led to the penalising of honest motorists and which this Government are prepared to do something about. I strongly support the Bill.

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[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chair of the Justice Committee, of which I am a member. I welcome his excellent points about our inquiry on this subject, but I do not speak with that hat on.

I co-chair the all-party parliamentary group on cycling, and we are working to shift the transport climate in this country so that more people more often feel safe and able to cycle as a normal means of transport. The Government have said they share that objective because they recognise that having more people cycling improves health and reduces congestion, pollution and costs, but I am concerned that many Conservative Members who have spoken in this debate have generally focused on car drivers and have not appeared to acknowledge that all their constituents are pedestrians at times, that many of them cycle and that many do not drive at all.

My contribution will focus on how those riding cycles, and other vulnerable road users not in a motor vehicle, such as pedestrians and motorcyclists, are affected by this Bill. I was pleased to hear the Justice Secretary indicating that the Government have accepted the recommendation of the Justice Committee and many others to drop the proposal to increase the small claims track limit—the SCL—for personal injury cases from £1,000 to £5,000 for all road traffic collision claims from vulnerable road users. However, I need some clarity on that from the Minister and will be listening carefully to his summing up. First, do the Government mean that vulnerable road users will be excluded from both the tariff and the small claims limit measures? Secondly, I am looking for clarity on how the changes will happen. Will this be through amendments to the Bill in Committee or through statutory instruments?

Notwithstanding my welcoming of the general principle of what the Justice Secretary said and my questions seeking clarity on that, I will continue with my now somewhat revised speech, so that my focus on and concern for vulnerable road users is on the public record.

The Government continue to propose to increase the SCL to £5,000 for all road traffic collision claims, apart from those from vulnerable road users, as we have heard in this debate, although it is also proposed to raise public and employer liability claims limits to £2,000. So there will still be inconsistency among claimants depending on whether the claim is for personal injury or it is a public or employer liability claim. Without change, the Bill would have affected approximately 70% of cyclists’ personal injury claims, and a similar percentage of motorcyclists’ claims, for general damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity, as many of those—70%—are for less than £5,000. We can assume that for pedestrians the figure is roughly the same, although we do not have the figure. That is why I want to see exactly what the Government mean by removing vulnerable road users from the Bill. VRU claims make up a very small percentage both of all claims and of the total cost of all claims, so doing the right thing will not cost very much.

I wish to focus on three issues, the first of which is the complexity of VRU personal injury claims. The Government repeatedly say that small claims are straightforward and can be achieved without professional support, but often that is not so in the case of road traffic collision claims made by cyclists. Many cyclists’ claims will involve complex arguments concerning what can appear to be conflicting Highway Code rules; there are 14 different rules on junction priority, for example. Even where liability is accepted, contributory negligence arguments are commonly made in courts; arguments are made about a cyclist’s clothing, their position on the road, whether they had their lights on and so on. In pedestrians’ claims, issues are often raised, either in terms of liability or contributory negligence, about where the pedestrian crossed the road; subjective issues also arise, such as whether they took sufficient care for their own safety.

Secondly, I wonder whether one reason the Government are now removing VRUs from the changes is that these road users do not get whiplash injuries and do not make fraudulent claims for whiplash—such claims purportedly being one reason for this Bill. That is because it is almost impossible to get whiplash when on a bike or on foot; those road users generally tend to suffer from broken bones and punctured lungs.

Without these changes being offered today by the Government, we would have had fewer victims of road traffic collisions who were not travelling in a car making a claim. That would have meant a win-win for insurance companies and dangerous drivers, which is unacceptable. Although I am pleased to hear that the Justice Secretary has recognised the concerns of organisations representing vulnerable users—cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians and so on—by taking them out of the SCL rate, I still have a concern about the Bill, and it is one raised by other Opposition Members today. It would be fairer to have a uniform small claims limit for all personal injury cases, at or only slightly above the current £1,000 limit. That would achieve the Justice Secretary’s aims of excluding vulnerable road users in a straightforward manner and would also ensure fairness for all road users, regardless of their mode of transport.