Last night's meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services was rather more tense than is usually the case as doctors and medical reporting agencies battled to get their views on the seemingly uncontrollable surge in whiplash claims across to MPs.

"Don't blame us" was the essence of their message which clearly wasn't what the members of the group, led by chairman Jonathan Evans, wanted to hear.

To be fair to both Donald Fowler, the managing director of the Premex Group and Dr John Canning, chair of the Professional Fees Committee of the British Medical Association, they set out to create some balance in a debate that, certainly within in the All Party Group, has been tilted towards the insurer perspective. In attempting to do this they at least flushed out some of the areas where Parliamentary opinion is beginning to firm up on this issue, although that wasn't necessarily what they wanted to hear.

The medical profession came under fire, especially from Lord Hunt, for submitting medical reports based on telephone consultations, a practice that Jack Straw is gathering evidence on. While Dr Canning was able to quote alot of fine words from General Medical Council guidance on writing reports about the need for honesty and completeness, he found himself struggling to defend the submission of reports where the patient hasn't been seen. This is something that is permitted under the GMC guidance and Dr Canning outlined some types of cases where it might make sense but he failed to convince Lord Hunt and his colleagues in the group that this was acceptable.

Mr Fowler tried to provide some context to the work of medical reporting agencies such as Premex and made a bold attempt to challenge the terms in which the debate is being conducted: "What is whiplash?", he asked, "It is hard to understand the figures without having a clear view of what whiplash is in the context of soft tissue injury", he told the group. The figure he was referring to is the one that is now uppermost in the minds of MPs: 1600 new whiplash claims every day. It was a bold attempt but one that was doomed to fail because this figure has shocked MPs and is now firmly fixed as their principal reference point for this debate.

What MPs want is answers to the simple question: Why are there 1600 new claims every day? They believe that this is an unacceptable figure and that there must be a substantial amount of fraud for it to be so high. They had hoped to find that the medical profession and medical reporting agencies were making a significant contribution to this deluge of claims but both Dr Canning and Mr Fowler at least managed to escape being saddled with that responsibility. Instead they presented themselves as the innocent but honest parties in a flawed system.

So, where do the flaws lie?

Clearly, referral fees are a significant culprit. They force claims into a system where there is too much money to be made by lawyers. At the end of the process is the money paid to claimants, another incentive to turn relatively minor injuries into claims. I don't know the answer to this but I suspect that one of the reasons we have more claims most European countries is that the compensation we pay is much higher. I say this because one point that struck me yesterday and has had me wondering in earlier presentations is why, if we use the same diagnositic tools as the rest of the world (which we were reassured that we do) do we have so many more claims? Surely, it can only be because our legal system puts a higher value on the pain and suffering of relatively minor soft tissue injuries than elsewhere? Does this make our system better or worse? That is a question that the insurance industry could very usefully invest in some proper research to help find answer.

The other challenge to the insurance industry has to be to stop paying all referreal fees immediately. We know they are a significant contributory factor and a real incentive to creating claims where none would exist otherwise. Why wait for the legislation to ban them? Some insurers have already banned them – what is stopping the rest?

This issue is not going to go away. It is on the Prime Ministerial agenda, the Transport Select Committe is due to return to this topic shortly and Jack Straw is in no mood to let it drop. Solutions have to be found. They will be better solutions for being better informed and yesterday's meeting was another small step in that direction. It did, however, yet again highlight what we don't know as much as what we do know.

 

Rarely – indeed, possibly never – has the insurance industry emerged so triumphant from discussions with government. It has certainly never so comprehensively trounced the legal profession as it did last week at the 10 Downing Street summit on whiplash claims and rising motor insurance costs.

The six point plan drawn up at the end of the meeting was that drawn up by the Association of British Insurers, making no concessions to the legal, and especially the claimant, perspective. The ABI and the major insurers present at the meeting have been admirably restrained but they must be cock-a-hoop at the progress they made in their one hour with the Prime Minister. There are aspects of the agreement that place obligations on insurers but they expected that and those commitments around developing telematics, young drivers and fighting more claims have been drawn up in a way that the insurance industry will be comfortable with. It will prove a game changer as I predicted in the run-up to the meeting.

Of course, the legal lobby is reeling from this huge snub and several commentators have already highlighted the extent of the humiliation this represents for the Law Society and the other lobbying groups within the legal profession. Quite simply, in Mr Cameron's eyes lawyers have become part of the problem and have therefore forfieted the right to be consulted on the solution. This is very much part of Mr Cameron's style. We have seen it today with the exclusion of major organisations including the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing from the Downing Street summit on the NHS reforms. the Prime Minister is getting impatient on several fronts and is only interested in talking to people he believes can take the policies he supports forward.

I'll freely admit that I am no great fan of claimant lawyers as a group. There are many who do a fine job in representing vulnerable people with geniune claims against large institutions and vested interests but, as a group, they have allowed themselves to become too closely associated with ambulance chasing, with persuading people to make claims when they originally had no intention of doing so and of exploiting the greater awareness of health and safety for all it is worth and to the detriment of society as a whole. That image has now cost them dear and will continue to do so unless they wake up to the problem.

That said, I don't think it is very clever of the Prime Minister to have these one-sided summits on any issue. I believe that you usually end up with better legislation if you listen to all parties. This doesn't always mean you make alot of changes: sometimes just by involving so-called opponnets in shaping a solution they come to share that solution.

The Prime Minister's sudden intervention in the debate about motor insurance costs and, specifically, the contribution of the steep increase in whiplash claims to rising premiums is a real game changer. I can imagine the top brass at the Association of British Insurers dancing a jig of delight around their Gresham Street HQ when the invitation to meet David Cameron arrived.

The Prime Minister has clearly decided he is going to take some action on this issue as he has chosen a high profile approach. Downing Street has a discreet back door as well as a very public front door and if the PM had merely wanted to get better informed on the issues, explore whether solutions were available and see if the various interested parties could be persuaded to work together to find a way of curbing the claims costs and associated premium increases he would have ushered in a more diverse group through the back door and most of us would never be any the wiser that a meeting had taken place. Instead, later today, the ABI and a group of leading insurers will arrive at the front door and, crucially, there appear to have been no invitations issued to advocates of the claimant perspective. I expect that there has been a barrage of calls to the PM's office today from lawyers trying elbow their way in on the meeting. The bitter complaints from the Law Society about being excluded tell a a crucial story.

That story, quite simply, is that the Prime Minister has already decided he is broadly on the side of the insurers and that he accepts the broad thrust of their proposals for remedying the problem. These have been well rehearsed elsewhere. The insurers must brace themselves for being asked to pay a price for this Prime Ministerial support, however. I expect that will come in the form of an immediate voluntary ban on accepting referral fees - in advance of legislation - and a firm commitment to invest in telematics and better training for young drivers.

Whatever the outcome of the meeting it is a splendid feather in the ABI's cap that its sustained lobbying and publicity campaign has paid off so handsomely. It is now a case of watch this space.

The Transport Select Committee's latest report on the rising cost of motor insurance has forced the debate over the related scandals - and they are scandals - of whiplash claims and referral fees further up the political agenda. This is very welcome but there now there needs to be a constructive response from everyone.

For that to happen there has to be an acknowledgement by all concerned that a significant proportion of so-called whiplash claims are phony, either false or exaggerated. How big a proportion is almost impossible to tell but anecdotal comparisons with other European countries suggest it is a far worse problem than most people imagine. What would be useful now is an authoritative comparison across Europe and I would suggest that it is in the interest of the British insurance industry to put up the money for this and then to stand back from the work itself.

As far as I see it there are few people that come out of the current mess without some blame attached to them for creating it. Insurers have been too weak in challenging suspect claims and have participated in the money making merry-go-round of passing claims on; too many claimant lawyers sell people the idea that they have a claim when none exists; the courts have been weak in dealing with fraudsters; and doctors have been too easily duped by people following carefully crafted scripts. It is not a pretty picture.

If each group accepts its share of the blame then maybe we can start talking about finding a constructive solution and the person that has to be at the heart of that is the genuine claimant. It would be a very good starting point if we could start to create a picture of what the genuine claimant looks like: what type of car they were driving, the nature of the accident, their previous medical history, age, likely symptoms and so on. Much of this information already exists with the various motor accident research bodies and the World Health Organisation. It needs to be collated, verified and intelligently - and independently - analysed so that we can make sure that people with genuine claims are dealt with fairly, sympathetically and efficiently. I can't support the simplistic approach advocated by Jack Straw and others that we should switch the onus of proof in soft tissue neck injuries to the claimant. That would put insurers in an invidious and ultimately unpopular position.

I look forward to the next installment of this debate at the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services' meeting tomorrow afternoon when the select committee chair, Louise Ellman and Jack Straw will give their views on the way forward. 

The big question that seemed to trouble everyone at Tuesday's meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services which discussed whiplash claims was the poor quality of diagnosis by general practitioners. The group heard how there are scripts available on the internet that guide a 'patient' through how to describe the pain so that they can guarantee a diagnosis of whiplash.

However, top-flight medical evidence (from the World Health Organisation) now allows for systematic categorisation of whiplash associated disorders (WAD) but it has so far proved almost impossible to get GPs in this country to use this evidence-based approach. Until this challenge can be met, MPs heard, it will be very difficult to address the problems caused by whiplash claims which, at 1600 new diagnosis a day, far outstrip any comparable country. This is not just a problem for the insurance industry the committee was told by Dr Nick Kendell, who chaired a recent expert medical panel on WAD, but a serious problem for patients. He told MPs that serial ineffective treatments administered as a result of the misdiagnoses can often make the condition worse. It can also mean that a process of claiming for inappropriate compensation delays the delivery of effective treatment.

MPs were also told that on a recent visit to the Thatcham Motor Insurance Research Repair Centre engineers from Volvo were shocked to hear that accidents involving their cars in the UK gave rise to whiplash claims as this didn't happen elsewhere in Europe.

Some MPs were extremely critical of the current situation with group chairman Jonathan Evans highlighting the problem of regional whiplash hotspots and Steve McCabe (Lab, Birmingham Selly Oak) condemning those who encourage false claims: "This is just the latest scam", he said, "It is aided and abetted by two of our most respected professions - the legal profession and the medical profession".

Despite this strong condemnation, Mr Evans said that he did not support the proposal in Jack Straw's bill to ban referral fees which would effectively reverse the burden of proof  for whiplash claims with the claimant having to prove that they are suffering a whiplash related disorder rather than the insurance company having to prove they aren't: "It is a much better option to get better information into the hands of the medical profession than to go down the route suggested by Jack Straw of reversing the burden of proof".

I think the next challenge for the All Party Group in helping to inform this debate before Mr Straw's bill reaches the floor of the House is to engage the medical profession, especially GPs, so that MPs can get a rounded view of the problem.

  

The All Party Parliamentary Group on Insurance & Financial Services will continue its autumn programme with meetings covering a range of topical issues, starting with the highly contentious topic of referral fees on 25 October.

Tuesday 25 October, 4.30pm. Portcullis House, Room M
Referral fees - What next?
• Will a ban succeed in the objective of reducing costs/motor premiums
• How can a ban be best policed/regulated?
Confirmed speaker: David Sandhu - Chief Executive Officer, AI Claims Solutions

Tuesday 15 November, 4.30pm. Portcullis House, Room N
A new consensus for tackling whiplash culture in the UK
• Can the insurance industry agree on how diagnosis, claims and treatment could be changed?
• Is there a better way?
Speakers: Andy Wigmore, on behalf of Health and Case Management
Prof Sir Mansel Aylward (TBC)

Tuesday 29 November, 4.30pm. Portcullis House, Room R
Payment Protection Insurance Claims and Beyond
• An update from the Financial Ombudsman Service
Confirmed speaker: Natalie Ceeney, Chief Executive and Chief Ombudsman, Financial Ombudsman Service

All of these meetings are open to the public although accommodation in the Portcullis House meetings rooms can be limited. Anyone attending should arrive early to allow time to pass through the security checks.

For further information on the All Party Group please contact:

Jonathan Swift
020 7316 9321
jonathan.swift@incisivemedia.com

David Worsfold
020 7316 9282
david.worsfold@incisivemedia.com