.For the purposes of this article I am going to discuss the law that is applicable for an accident involving a works vehicle. I’m going to cover what happens if you are injured because the vehicle is broken or defective as oppose to a general road accident – unless the accident was caused due to a defect.

A vehicle provided by your employer is classed as work equipment, and is therefore subject to The Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998. This hugely important piece of legislation puts an important duty on your employer to make sure that work equipment that is provided to you is, in essence, safe to use.

I will quote some of the important parts of the regulations:

5.1 – “Every employer shall ensure that work equipment is maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair.”

5.2 – “Every employer shall ensure that where any machinery has a maintenance log, the log is kept up to date.”
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Whilst the majority of road accidents are fairly easy to resolve when it comes to establishing who is at fault, accidents involving roundabouts and lane changing can sometimes prove to be difficult. Unless you have an honest Defendant driver who is willing to hold their hands up and accept they’re wrong, or unless you have an eye witness evidence or CCTV on your side, it could end up being one word against the other.

For the topic of this blog I will discuss people cutting other drivers up on roundabouts at exits. It came to me because just this morning a lunatic with a caravan decided to stick to the outside lane when going right round a roundabout. He/she therefore drove straight across my exit. Thankfully, being what I’d class as a fairly experienced driver with a keen eye for hazard spotting given my line of work, I clocked that he/she was going to do it way before the vehicle cut across my path. I had more than enough time to come to a halt and bang my horn in frustration at him.
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By this, I’m talking about where an insurer approaches you directly to settle a claim, but you are wise enough to get a lawyer and make a claim the proper way. If you do this, could you end up with less compensation with the lawyer?

It’s never guaranteed whether the pre-medical offer could be beaten, but here are the facts surrounding pre-medical offers based on industry knowledge and our clients own experiences…

Why make a low offer?

Pre-medical offers are offers made by insurers to save themselves money. An insurance company’s duty is to their shareholders – that’s to maximise profits to maintain their shareholders return on investment. To do this, they need to save money; and to save money, they need to pay out as little as possible to accident victims. So don’t let them fool you in to thinking that they are doing this to get you a quick settlement right away.
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I’m going to write in parts to this article – one from the perspective of a trainee or new employee having an accident, and the other from the perspective of someone injured by a trainee or new employer at work!

You Start Work

So you start your new job and you are being trained up in how to be as efficient as possible for the company. There are lots of things you need to learn and health and safety is an issue that needs to be in the forefront of both your mind and your employers. When you are in a new environment, you may lack the skills necessary to understand certain risks. For ease of example, we’ll use a building site:
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Just so you know, the reason I’m writing about skidding accidents is because I’m rather confused – it’s a summer evening here in our midlands based office and for reasons that just don’t seem to make sense, its hailing! In the middle of summer!  Our weather seems to have gone crazy in recent years, and hail in the middle of summer just doesn’t make sense.

Its heavy, and the roads are pretty waterlogged, so driving conditions are dangerous in places. As such, we all need to adapt as drivers to the conditions we are driving in – so in periods of wet weather when the road is slippery, we need to take extra care. This means slowing down and increasing the distances between vehicles.

So what happens if a car skids and causes an accident? What if traffic suddenly slowed and a driver brakes but loses their grip due to the road conditions and crashes in to another vehicle? Is it just one of those things? Can you blame someone for the weather? Well a driver cannot normally use the excuse that the road was wet as a defence to the claim – the Highway Code states that you have to keep a greater distance in slippery conditions.
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£1,000? £3,000? £10,000? £50,000? – it’s not a very easy question to answer on the face value of things.

The way your claim is valued is by a suitable expert providing a medico-legal report which is then used to value the claim in line with official Judicial Council guidelines and the experience of your lawyer. The severity and longevity of your whiplash injury usually dictates the valuation of the claim.

Generally speaking, the more you suffer, the more we get for you.

I can tell you that the average minor whiplash claim settles for around £2,500, and most people will fall within the minor whiplash category. The official brackets are roughly £1,000 to £5,000.
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Cyclists that are on the road are in a lot of danger simply because they do not have the same protection offered by a car. When a cyclist is involved in an accident the injuries sustained can be life changing and therefore making a claim can seem like the only option. When pursuing a claim we look to claim for general damages for your initial pain and suffering and also something called special damages- these are any losses that you have incurred because of the accident which can also include care and assistance from friends and family.

Roundabouts are often considered one of the most dangerous places because they are designed to keep traffic flowing without the need of traffic lights to give a dedicated and more secure right of way. Sometimes they are a bit of a free for all when drivers ignore the rules of the road! The main thing to remember on roundabouts is that if you are already on the roundabout proceeding correctly and someone pulls onto the roundabout and hits you, it is likely that if an accident occurs they will be at fault as you are already established on the roundabout. New users entering a roundabout have the duty to give precedence to those already on the roundabout.
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Forklift trucks are widely used in a lot of industries. Given how common they are, accidents at work involving forklift trucks are fairly common. So if you are at work and you have been injured in a forklift truck accident, are you entitled to make a claim for personal injury compensation? Here’s some advice:

Can You Claim?

Whether you can claim or not is down to the individual circumstances of your accident. Common examples where you may have a claim could be:
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At one time or another we have all complained about the poor state of our roads and pavements. This is usually caused by our inclimate weather that washes the surface away or freezes in cracks and expands, breaking the ground around it.

Most of the complaints come from people who have either had damage caused to their car by potholes on the road, or by people who were innocently walking on the pavement (as you should) who have then found themselves on the floor wondering what has happened. It is the latter situation that I shall discuss in this blog.

Broken kerbs can be incredibly dangerous as it can mean that when an accident occurs you can find yourself on a busy road, and possibly in the path of moving vehicles. So who is responsible for keeping the pavements safe?
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The recent PIP scandal has brought these types of claims to the forefront, although the legislation (The Sale and Supply of Goods and Services Act) is often associated more with trying to return goods to a store/seller. However, the Act can be important in personal injury claims, specifically where the provision of a service or good has breached the terms of the Act and have led to personal injury.

The Act states that goods and services should be of a satisfactory quality and fit for purpose and is something that may ring bells with a lot of us who have ever bought something from a store for it to break 2 days later. It gives consumers protection that the goods that they are purchasing do what they should and perform to a satisfactory level.  The PIP breast scandal brought this to the forefront as it has been established by a report led by Sir Bruce Keogh that the implants were not fit for purpose, nor of satisfactory quality, due to the grade of silicon that was used in them and the substandard skin of the implants.
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