Personal injury

The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers: our injury prevention objective

Brett Dixon discusses APIL’s injury prevention objective, ie, ‘for people not to be injured needlessly in the first place’, and its connection to the Civil Liability Bill.

About the author Brett Dixon is president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL).

Civil Liability Bill

A determination to cut the price of motor insurance premiums spawned the government’s Civil Liability Bill and also connected planned reforms to the personal injury small claims limit. The method, however, is misguided.

The annual cost to insurers of motor-related personal injury claims has plummeted by 20 per cent in five years. Vehicle damage costs, meanwhile, have soared by the same amount and tax on premiums has doubled.

I could fill many pages with evidence which discredits the foundations of the Civil Liability Bill, and APIL is doing all it can to bring this evidence to the attention of parliamentarians. CILEx members practising personal injury are, however, no doubt already aware that genuine claimants are simply scapegoats for the price of premiums.

Promoting injury prevention

Among our wide set of objectives, which readers will remember from my previous article, is promoting injury prevention (see (2018) Summer CILExJ p36). This aim often raises eyebrows as it sounds like turkeys voting for Christmas; however, APIL’s job is to promote the needs of injured people, and the best way to do that is to try to ensure they are not injured in the first place.

Our lobbying work and injury prevention work are very much linked. At no point during this parliament or the last has the government made any mention of reducing the number of motor insurance bodily injury claims by cutting the number of needless injuries. The agenda only targets the claims.

Every third Wednesday in August, APIL hosts Injury Prevention Day. This year we focused on promoting the proper positioning of vehicle head restraints to help protect passengers and drivers from soft tissue injuries. These are the same injuries which are so often under attack from ill-conceived reform. Our members, firms, and other organisations got involved in the event and promoted their own messages for avoiding harm. In previous years, APIL has also urged drivers not to tailgate other vehicles in order to avoid the low-impact collisions on the UK’s congested roads which give rise to whiplash injuries. Our reach is not wide enough to stop needless whiplash injury in its tracks, but it is a start. And I would encourage anyone to get involved next summer.

Conclusion

Injured clients would prefer not to be injured at all. I have lost count of the number of times someone has said to me: ‘I’d rather just be the way I was.’ It is a pity that the government has not put its energy into a public awareness campaign to cut the pain and suffering - and the cost - caused by needless injury.