Road Traffic Accidents - New Claim Procedure

A new scheme for road traffic accident (RTA) claims comes into effect today. It is a massive change to the legal process and has the aim of producing settlements much more quickly than at present. It has been set up to deal with low value RTA claims – those between £1,000 and £10,000.

The new scheme will involve filling in a form on-line at the ‘RTA Portal’. Insurers have 15 days after the completion of the form to admit liability. If the insurers respond in time, a ‘stage 1’ payment of £400 will be made to the solicitor within 10 business days.

There is a staged process for the payment of legal fees based on submissions, with a tight timetable attached to each submission. The idea is that this will allow more cases to be processed more quickly. In practical terms, this speeding up may not be in the best interests of the claimant, however, as (for example), expert medical examinations undertaken too soon may miss downstream complications that would have been discovered had the examination taken place later.

At the final stage in the process, the ‘hearing’ may be simply based on the written submissions or an oral hearing limited to submissions (ie with no cross-examination).