MPs demand answers amid ‘growing’ backlog in OIC portal and rising premiums

More than 300,000 claimants are still waiting for their cases to be resolved on the Official Injury Claim (OIC) service portal, the justice committee has warned.

In a report published today (20 September 2023), the committee said that the average time taken to settle cases was 251 days – and was predicted to increase further – and urged the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to investigate the backlog.

It also urged for transparency over how promises of cheaper car insurance premiums were being met after the government estimated that whiplash reforms would lead to a reduction in prices.

The OIC was setup in May 2021 as part of the government’s whiplash reform programme to reduce the number and cost of whiplash claims in England and Wales.

Earlier this year (13 February 2023), the justice committee called for evidence into its impacts and asked for the sector’s thoughts on specific issues.

According to the justice committee’s report, some 568,214 claims had been submitted up to 30 June 2023, but only 146,626 had reached settlement to date.

And 72,141 claims had exited the portal for a reason other than settlement, of which 8,023 had gone to court.

This meant that approximately 349,000 cases remained in the portal pending a resolution—up from just under 212,000 at the same point in 2022.

“One of the objectives of the OIC portal was to simplify and speed up the process of making a claim for whiplash injuries,” MP Sir Bob Neill, chair of the justice committee, said.

“Whilst we acknowledge that the nature of the claims process is such that there will always be a stock of cases in the portal at different stages in the claims lifecycle – and that some will take longer to reach a resolution than others – we recommend the MoJ investigates further the reasons for the growing number of unresolved cases and the deterioration in the timeliness of reaching settlement and publishes its findings by the end of the year.”

Representation

Meanwhile, of the total number of claims submitted via the portal since its inception, some 56,064 (10%) were brought by unrepresented claimants, whilst 514,150 (90%) of claimants had legal representation.

This was despite the OIC portal having been designed for claimants to use without the need for legal representation.

The report noted the low proportion of unrepresented claimants using the OIC portal reflected both the “complexity of the process for claimants attempting to navigate it by themselves and a lack of awareness of the new process”.

“It is not clear to what extent a lack of awareness of the portal is responsible for the low number of unrepresented claims,” the report said.

It also highlighted evidence submissions that expressed concern about system integration between the OIC portal and existing case management systems used by legal professionals.

Therefore, the justice committee stressed that it was “vital that any technological problems which professional users of the OIC face that affect efficiency, accuracy or timeliness are resolved as a matter of urgency”.

It also recommended that the MoJ and Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB) conduct research to understand whether steps to improve awareness of the OIC portal and user-confidence in the system would encourage more litigants in person.

“[The MoJ’s findings] should also include an analysis of timeliness in comparison to how equivalent cases previously progressed in the MoJ’s claims portal and of the apparent disparity in settlement times between represented and unrepresented claims,” Sir Neill added.

Premiums

Meanwhile, under the whiplash reforms, the government estimated that savings made by insurance companies would lead to a reduction in motor insurance premiums by approximately £35 per policy.

However, the majority of the evidence submissions received by the justice committee noted that motor insurance premiums had continued to rise.

And last month (11 August 2023), the ABI revealed that the average premium paid for private comprehensive motor insurance surged 21% year-on-year to £511 in Q2 2023, the highest level since records began in 2012.

As a result of rising prices, the report concluded it was vital that the direct effect of the whiplash reforms was “properly assessed”.

It recommended that given the reforms were still bedding in and the large number of cases still awaiting settlement, the government conduct a follow-up assessment one year after the publication of its planned review in 2024-25.