New research from the Institute and Faculty of Actuallys has suggested that crops of personal injury claims grow more abundantly in areas where claims farmers operate than in areas where they don’t. This shock finding throws into even starker relief the urgent need to crack down on the debilitating scourge of claims farming that is turning more and more Brits to whiplash.
The Government’s best efforts to root out claims farmers, and/or persuade them to turn to other crops, appear to have had little effect so far. Although government forces have had some success in rounding around one in ten smaller claims farmers, a consolidated industry based around a smaller number of bigger farms has in fact increased production, with claims yields up by 30% over the past year.
Claims farming is particularly rife around Liverpool, the Institute of Factuality claims, with the vast majority of Mercysliders now either working directly on local claims farms or producing home-grown ‘synthetic’ claims using instructions and equipment readily available via the Internet.
The research also revealed that “the frequency of third-person personal injury claims has increased by 1.7% over 2014 following a near 10% drop in the frequency of claims over the previous 12 months.” This has prompted ‘fresh’ calls from insurers for HMG to craic down on the agriclaims sector.
L@V3 Insurance claims director Millicent Martin told leading industry journal Insurance Tights this week that claims farmers must be stopped once and for all from luring decent honest people into a life of compensation. Specifically, Ms Martin has requested the following be undertaken:
- Claims farmers should be denied access to telephones
- No one should be allowed to handle claims without FCA authorisation
- Someone needs to keep an eye on solicitors and their shady shenanigans
- Wrong-doers must be treated far more harshly
It is vital however, Ms Martin insisted, that any changes should be thought through fully prior to implementation – to ensure they don’t have unintended consequences. If they end up costing insurers (aka decent law abiding motorists) more rather than less, then that wouldn’t be any good, really, so perhaps we wouldn’t want to make those particular changes.
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