Insurance reform overdue

Successive ministers at the Department for Transport (DfT) may have acted in breach of the law on motor insurance for decades, according to a senior solicitor who is considering bringing a formal complaint to the European Commission.

In “Good law?”, published exclusively on the NLJ website this week, Nicholas Bevan argues that the DfT’s arrangements for victims of uninsured and untraced drivers over the last 70 years conflict with several basic tenets of the rule of law.

Bevan says the Motor Insurers Bureau (MIB) Agreements, under which victims are compensated, also infringe European Community laws, and should be revoked. The DfT is due to revise its compensation scheme for victims later this month. Bevan, a personal injury solicitor with more than 25 years’ experience, campaigns for reform of motor insurance law to adhere to the minimum standards of protection required by the European Motor Insurance Directive. Bevan argues that, as a result of various flaws and loopholes in the law in this area, the government has been in breach of the European Motor Insurance Directives since 1973 and questions the legal standing of the MIB Agreements: “If the House of Lords, in White v White [2001] UKHL 9, was correct in classing them as no more than private law agreements between a minister and a contractor, then it is difficult to discern the constitutional principle under which they confer judiciable rights on private citizens.

“We have a right to a properly integrated compensatory guarantee scheme: one that is clear and accurate in the rights it confers and free of loopholes and partiality.

 At the very least, it must conform to Community law minimum standards. Our national law provision should protect the vulnerable by guaranteeing that victims will receive the full amount of damages they are entitled to.”