New agreement imposed to help people claim against uninsured drivers
- 16.11.2015
- JeremySmith
- Personal-injury, Opinion, Personal-injury, Opinion
Every year many thousands of people are the victims of motor accidents where the driver is uninsured.
Fortunately they are usually able to claim against the Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB), who were set up to compensate such victims. However, past MIB Agreements continued strict procedural rules that had to be followed and anyone failing to do so could find their claim dismissed, which led to many injustices.
Eventually the Government accepted this was unfair and so from 1 August 2015 there is a new Agreement which has made the rules much simpler. More people should therefore now be able to receive the compensation they deserve after suffering injury at the hands of uninsured drivers.
In the past, the MIB also attempted to bar claims from anyone who was a passenger injured in a car driven by an uninsured driver when they “ought to have known” that the driver had no insurance.
As long ago as 2001, PotterReesDolan (then known as Hugh Potter & Co) had to take a case to the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court) to decide exactly what was meant by this phrase “ought to have known”.
We won that case (the case of White v White (2001) UKHL 9 , (2001) 1 WLR 481) and I am very pleased to see that the new Agreement has dropped the phrase altogether. Another victory, even if it has taken 14 Years!