Government postpones controversial plans to extend Road Traffic Accident portal scheme
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has postponed its controversial plans to extend the Road Traffic Accident portal scheme to personal injury claims worth up to £25,000, including employer and public liability claims.
Currently, the portal applies to RTA claims worth up to £10,000.
The extension had been due to take place in April. A new date is yet to be given by the MoJ, which said this week that “further details” would be announced soon.
NLJ columnist, Professor Dominic Regan said the delay was “no surprise at all” and showed “an outbreak of common sense in the MoJ”.
“The concept stinks and delay will not improve a hopeless idea. Sir Rupert Jackson thought it wrong to extend the portals so early — the RTA one was only created at the end of April 2010.”
An MoJ spokesperson said: “Earlier this year the government announced proposals to extend the road traffic accident scheme for personal injury claims to £25,000.
“Following a legal challenge the Justice Secretary is now considering afresh the timing for implementation of the extended scheme.”
Several lawyers had cast doubt on the viability of the April deadline, as well as questioning how well such an extended scheme might work in practice.
Professor Paul Fenn, an adviser to the government on personal injury, said in a speech in December that the RTA Portal had been “successful in reducing costs and delay, but not by a lot; and to set against that, it seems to have resulted in lower damages for claimants.
“But it really needed a little more time to be conclusive about this, and for that reason I do think it may be too soon to extend its remit”.
Prof Fenn said there were risks regarding the incentive of defendants to admit liability, both in the existing scheme and in the proposals to extend it.
The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers was in the process of bringing a judicial review, on the basis of lack of consultation. It is now reconsidering its position.
Writing in NLJ in June, Prof Regan described the idea of an employer’s liability portal for April as “ludicrous”. He said a third of cases exited the portal, partly because this was cheaper for insurers where cases were worth less than £2,000, and partly because insurers did “not abide by the timetable applicable to portal work”. Employment cases tended to be more complex therefore there would be a high exit rate, he said.
