Can I Still Claim Compensation for Whiplash?

A constant question that crops up is, “Can I still claim compensation for Whiplash?” The answer is an emphatic YES. Why wouldn’t you be able to claim compensation for Whiplash? We’ll explain why you might have thought you couldn’t.

People still suffer from Whiplash injury. It hasn’t gone away. Whiplash can be caused by a sharp movement while driving a car or in a fall, or on a ride in a themepark. It can happen anywhere. It’s common. It’s also common that many people DO NOT claim.

Naturally, however some people want to claim for their injury, especially if it is non-fault, and there is liability. Contrary to what you might read or hear online. There has always been a lot of negativity around Whiplash because it is a frequent injury. Unfortunately, there is also a small proportion of fraudulent claims made too which ruins it for the majority.

Because of this small culture of fraud, over the previous 4 or 5 years there have been various campaigns to discredit whiplash injury in order to benefit big insurance company profits. This is a simplified view but evidence suggests it’s the correct one.

So you wouldn’t be on your own if you thought that whiplash claims were not allowed. This negative thinking is a result of consistent marketing and lobbying by some very powerful insurance companies.

As reported by the Law Gazatte in 2016 a freedom of information request by the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) revealed that the government’s compensation recovery unit recorded 335,365 whiplash claims in 2015/16, a fall of 11% on 2015. The information request also revealed a similar set of data for 2013/14. In fact the Department for Work and Pensions’ Compensation Recovery Unit (CRU) recently reported that the total number of personal injury cases registered with it fell by 13% to 853,615 in 2017/18.

There is not such thing as a ‘compensation culture’ in the UK.

The biggest sources of cases, motor claims, fell year-on-year by 17% to around 650,000. So YES, you can claim for whiplash. Go ahead.

The data perhaps reveals that phrases such as ‘compensation culture’, or ‘whiplash culture’ exist to discredit injury claims. There is NO evidence that the UK has a ‘compensation culture’. This is an urban myth. Personal injury claims have been decreasing year on year since before 2014.

Car insurance premiums are supposed to be falling by at least £30 a year after the government plans to reduce the number of whiplash claims made by increasing the minimum claim amount.allowed. This change would be a big shake up of the Civil Liability Bill currently passing through the Commons at Westminster.

Support for this change is not unanimous in Parliament.