Industry news roundup: week ended 17 Nov 2014:
With the number of injurious car accident claims going down, research says that insurance costs have relaxed a bit in response to the good news.
It’s been something like ten years since personal injury claims in related to third parties have gone down, says the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, and the good news is that this should be driving down insurance costs by quite a bit. The IFoA says that the changes in legal regulations that were set in place in April of 2013 are finally trickling through enough to effect some real change when it comes to the number of personal injury compensation claims being brought against insurers.
Most of the credit, the organisation says, has to go to the LASPO regulations that banned referral fees in 2013. Critics were getting tired of saying how injurious referral fees were to the insurance and the personal injury compensation markets as they led to the rise of those vile bastard claims management companies that specialised in throwing as many injury claims against the wall as they possibly could just to see which ones would stick. Third party legal costs were also curtailed by the regulations, and that meant there has been more money staying in insurers’ coffers than previously – and you know as well as I do how much insurance companies like holding on to other people’s money!
The IFoA says that overall there’s probably been something like a 10 per cent drop in how many third-party insurance claims have been brought since LASPO became law. Only around £238 million has been spent on these claims since then, a nice drop from the £354 million from beforehand; in even better news there are now 35 per cent fewer claims management companies active today than there were prior to LASPO going into effect.
It’s that last statistic that makes me so happy. Honestly I’m chuffed to bits thinking about how all those ambulance-chasing bastards are out of work now. I suppose they’ll have to go find honest jobs like the rest of us, the poor sods. Well, no skin off my nose – if you ask me, they’ve had it coming for years. Good riddance to bad rubbish and all that.