MoJ claims portal: A fast track to fresh delays?

The brief history of IT procurement is littered with botched public sector-led projects.

You might have thought, therefore, that the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) would have been fully aware of the potential for bungling when it launched a new online system for processing low-value road traffic accident (RTA) claims last year.

The introduction of the system was beset by chaos, however, which threatened to undermine the entire credibility of a system designed to dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of the claims process.

As the first anniversary of the portal approaches, Insurance Times investigates why the new system’s launch went so wrong and how it is functioning now. We also examine the prospects for the government’s planned further roll-out of the portal to all claims under £50,000, announced last week.

A standing start

The MoJ’s new claims portal went live on 30 April last year. Within days, it was obvious that all was far from well with the online system that had been set up to act as a secure data exchange for information relating to all RTA claims worth between £1,000 and £10,000.

A week after the portal went live, some insurers and many personal injury law firms acting for claimants were still waiting for the log-in that would enable them to access it. A month later, around 50 law firms had still not received their log-in details, meaning that they could not even begin to handle claims on the system.

The situation wasn’t much better for many of those who were able to log on: they found they could not use the system to go beyond the initial claims notification stage. This was because, as the portal provider Insurance Database Services Ltd admitted, the so-called ‘stage two’ software had not even been signed off when the system went live.

The root cause of the glitches, admits the long-suffering chair of the portal steering group Tim Wallis, was the project’s rushed implementation. “I always felt that the IT project was a two-year project, but one that was launched in six months,” he says.

Allianz claims director Graham Gibson agrees. “There is no doubt that the system was set up too quickly.”

Gibson gives a snapshot of the chaos surrounding the implementation, describing how the rules governing the portal’s operation were drafted and redrafted while the software was still being developed. “You don’t have to be Einstein to work out that’s where you don’t want to be,” he says, “There were difficulties from day one. I would not want to be there again.”

The problems surrounding the implementation of the portal were grist to the mill for those who were outright opposed to the introduction of the new system. Smaller high street lawyers, a group of whom threatened to mount a judicial review of the new system on the grounds that it would erode client confidentiality, particularly contested the reform. Those naysayers aside, the portal’s teething problems inevitably undermined the credibility of the new system among all of its users.

Past the first roadblock

Nearly 12 months from these first, chaotic days, most judge that the portal is working much more smoothly. There’s little more than perceptions to go on, however: no hard figures on the system’s performance have been published since June last year, barely a month after it went live. A spokesman for the portal said new statistics were awaiting final sign-off from the MoJ when this article went to press.

There was some indication in December, however: according to figures quoted at the Motor Accident Solicitors Society (MASS)’s annual conference, only 7% of claims had been fully settled by then, just over seven months after the portal’s launch. And around 30% had exited the system at the first stage of the process, with two-thirds falling out owing to a lack of response from insurers, rather than any dispute over liability.

Claimant law firm Stephensons partner Andrew Welch believes that the portal’s teething problems have largely gone away, however.

“[The portal] is going pretty well at the moment. It is meeting a lot of its objectives for both sides in the sense that it’s saving insurers money and, from the claimant lawyers’ point of view, it helps with cash flow,” Welch says, adding that claimants are tending to get their money quicker.

Despite his misgivings about how the new system was introduced, Gibson agrees. “It works and it works pretty well: before the portal, anybody could run a claim any way they like – and that went for claimant and defendants.”

The system has got rid of many of the delays that bedevilled the old system, adds Wallis. “For the first time all the fields are filled in, so you don’t have to waste time going back to get missing bits of information, like National Insurance numbers.”

Not quite there yet

However, Wallis admits that the system’s rushed implementation continues to cast a shadow over its performance, with the portal largely still a “work in progress”.

“We are still doing things that should have been done before the portal went live,” he says.

AXA claims technical director Gerry Ward observes that the system is still troubled by glitches. As an example, he says it is hard to distinguish cases that have been dropped because they lack merit, from those where the claimant lawyer has chosen not to progress the claim after pocketing the £400 payment for notifying the insurer. “It’s difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff.”

Some of these problems, he hopes, will be resolved by a software upgrade that has just gone through.

“From a functionality point of view, the portal is still at a very early stage and needs more refining,” he says.

Association of Personal Injury Lawyers incoming president David Bott agrees. “We would very much like this to be the all-singing, all-dancing portal.” But for now, he believes, it is “not quite the finished article”.

“It’s clear that it will probably be another 12 months for the portal to be the portal that we wanted. At the moment, it’s getting there,” he says.

The next destination

All of these issues would be footnotes in the great book of Whitehall IT disasters were it not for last week’s announcement by the Ministry of Justice that it wants the portal to handle all claims worth under £50,000. The government is clearly pinning a lot of hopes on the IT system’s capacity to rein in claims process costs, sparking fears that the coalition could be repeating its predecessor’s mistakes.

Beachcroft partner Andrew Parker points out that the MoJ originally wanted to go further than the £10,000 limit. But Stephenson’s Welch is worried that the portal will not be the right mechanism for handling other types of liability.

“The problem is that if there is a dispute, [the cases] come out. If you are thinking of rolling it out into employers’ liability or clinical negligence cases, liability is going to be disputed in almost all cases.

“The only cases that the portal will be able to handle are fairly straightforward ones. It does not have a mechanism for resolving disputes where fault is disputed,” he says, pointing out that in clinical negligence cases it is necessary to obtain statements from all parties.

Welch adds: “The portal has been successful in dealing with uncontested, straightforward, low-value cases, but I can’t see how it could lend itself to a dispute over whether there should be any liability at all.”

He predicts that nearly all of the new classes of liability claims will automatically exit the system once it is widened.

Worth the wait?

Law firm CS2 director, and past president of MASS, John Spencer agrees. “Different liabilities typically pose different problems and issues that need to be treated differently. One will see less admitted cases with other liabilities typically.

“With more complicated or serious injury cases you have issues that may be relevant and need to be validated,” he says, adding a note of regret that the government is not concentrating on getting the existing system right first.

APIL’s Bott agrees: “Before we look at extending this one, we want to make sure that this one is right first.”

Even portal chair Wallis has words of caution for ministers. “The portal has been designed to deal with the most simple of claims. It’s a matter of logic that the more complex the claim gets, the more complex the portal has to be to deal with it.”

Building on the experience of the past year, Wallis believes that the software for rolling out an extension of the system can be developed, he adds, but it will cost.

“The learning curve suggests that we should do it, but we need to put in the resource.”

Gibson estimates that developing the IT systems needed to underpin an extended system will take a year to 18 months from start to finish.

Wallis agrees. ”It will take until the end of next year for it to be executed in the way we want it to be. We are still not there.”

But will ministers seeking headline-grabbing techno fixes to spiraling claims bills be prepared to wait?