One of the undoubted highlights of next year (2020) is certain to be the long awaited culmination of HMG’s plans to prove once and for all that there’s no such thing as whiplash by removing any possible financial incentive for private citizens and their aiders and abetters in the so-called legal community to carry on pretending that there is.
Five years after reforms were first proposed, and a year on from the original implementation date, the Civil Liability Act will finally (almost certainly) come into force in April 2020. Its effect will be to slash the cash that those claiming whiplash can claim by as much as 90%.
Naturally, there will be whingers. Only the other day, for instance, the Motor Accident Solicitors Society described the sensibly derisory tariffs adopted in the legislation as ‘fundamentally flawed, arbitrary and wholly unjust, contrived without any objectivity, logic or scrutiny.’ But what would you expect a bunch of lawyers to say!
In reality, of course, the tariffs are positively generous. Even supposing whiplash were a real thing and not a sham put up by malingering freeloaders, there’s a general recognition in UK society today that far too much fuss gets made about pain. We Brits didn’t get to be the masters of the world we are today (or was it yesterday?) by moaning on about a bit of neck gip – far less expecting a handout on the back of it.
Shaving a tad off the compensation potentially on offer for injuries lasting up to three months to slim it down from £2,250 to an altogether more proportionate £225 tempers prudence with charitable leniency. Nudging the potential award for injuries lasting up to six months down by just 85% to a perfectly adequate £450 looks equally sound. Such adjustments are surely both timely and equitable.
The numbers of those trying it on with trumped up neck-ache bellyaching are already plummeting as cervical injury bleaters recognise the ultimate futility of their pretence. Implementing the CLA should finally put these Moaning Minnies out of business – along with what’s left of all those legions of shameless solicitors who’ve wilfully egged them along into claiming so-called compensation.
Whiplash: faking it is literally this easy following a motor accident
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