The government is driving dangerously, says Nicholas Bevan
Road traffic accident practitioners could be forgiven if the department for transport’s consultation paper on updating parts of the Uninsured Drivers Agreement 1999 and the Untraced Drivers Agreement 2003 had escaped their notice (see Review of the Uninsured and Untraced Drivers’ Agreements).
It is regrettable that the consultation paper restricts its scope to a relatively small number of largely peripheral procedural issues confined to claims against uninsured and unidentified drivers. It makes no attempt to address the many egregious defects in the protection afforded to victims; both within these Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB) agreements as well as within Part VI of the Road Traffic Act 1988 and the European Communities (Rights against Insurers) Regulations 2002 (SI 2002/3061).
The plain fact of the matter is that the UK’s statutory and extra-statutory provision is not only out of keeping with the original parliamentary objectives of the Road Traffic Act 1930 but it also fails to meet the minimum standards imposed by the Sixth Motor Insurance
