It cannot be surprising to learn that many personal injury claims are brought as a result of Road Traffic Accidents (RTA’s), especially when you think how many cars there are on the roads and how congested our traffic is nowadays. Due to the fact that there are so many claims brought about as the result of RTA’s it is necessary to have proper measures in place to deal with them in the right way when it comes to people making claims for personal injury compensation.
This is where the “Pre-Action Protocol for Low Value Personal Injury Claims in Road Traffic Accidents” comes in – but what is this?
Protocols and procedures are all very legalistic ways of saying that there are rules in place that say how something should be done. The Protocol sets out time-frames and deadlines for certain steps of the claim to be completed which apply to both Claimant’s and Defendant’s.
That’s all well and good for the claim while it is still in this Protocol and going forward under the rules but there are times when the Protocol no longer applies to the claim and it is important to know how that can happen and what happens to the claim if the Protocol no longer applies to it.
There are 4 initial reasons why the RTA Protocol might stop applying to a claim and they are listed in paragraph 6.15 of the Protocol itself, these are:
- Where the Defendant alleges none seatbelt contributory negligence
- Where the Defendant denies liability
- Where the Defendant does not respond to the Claim Notification Form (CNF) in time
- Where the Defendant feels there is inadequate information in the CNF or the claim is worth less than £1,000
That all looks very well and good – but what does it mean?
If contributory negligence is alleged then this means that the other side are saying you are partly responsible for your accident and therefore partly responsible for your own injuries. This would obviously take a lot longer to investigate than the usual straightforward claims that the Protocol is designed to deal with and so imposing the time-limits from this wouldn’t be practical. However, as with all rules there are exceptions and the exception to this is where you admit that you weren’t wearing a seatbelt, in which case the claim will be allowed to stay in the Protocol.
In a very similar way a claim will come out of the Protocol rules if liability is denied by the Defendant. If this happens then the Defendant is saying that the accident is not their fault at all. Again, this will clearly take quite some looking into and so the Protocol would not be suitable.
Failure to respond to the CNF within the time limits provided in the Protocol would also mean that the claim comes out of this process as the Defendant is unlikely to comply with the Protocol properly if they aren’t in a position to get the basics right.
As the Protocol is designed for the simple administration of straightforward claims the lack of the required information on the CNF would clearly complicate matters and there has to be a limit on the minimum value of these claims as different procedures apply to claims valued less than £1,000.
Should you have a claim that comes out of the Protocol its obviously necessary to know what happens next, simply it is that once the claim comes out of the RTA Protocol it just carries on as a normal personal injury claim following the same rules and procedures that all other personal injury claims follow. There will be no affects on the ability to bring your claim and your compensation won’t be affected either it’s just that the rules governing the running of your claim will be slightly different and it could take a little longer.
