Friday, January 21, 2011

Accident Compensation From Uninsured Drivers

If you are involved in a road traffic accident which was not your fault, then many companies encourage you to make a personal injury compensation claim. Perhaps the most common type of injury resulting from a road accident is whiplash.  We all have the comedy image of whiplash from movies like “The Fortune Cookie” where Jack Lemon hires a lawyer called “Whiplash Willie” to help fake an injury.  The media continues to equate whiplash with schemers and fakers, suggesting that all you’ve got to do is strap on a neck brace and moan a bit, although people who genuinely suffer whiplash tend not to see the funny side.
Nonetheless, if you were a passenger in a vehicle involved in the collision that caused your whiplash injury, your compensation claim would be made against the insurance company of the person responsible for the accident.  That could be the driver of the car you were travelling in or a third party.  If you are a driver, a cyclist or a pedestrian your whiplash compensation claim would be made against the insurance company of the person driving the vehicle that collided with you and caused your injury. Any road traffic accident should be reported to the police, but even if no criminal charges are levied, anyone injured would still be entitled to claim compensation from the driver’s insurance company.
Therein lies the main problem of course.  What happens if the offending party is driving without any sort of insurance cover?  We all suspect that a person reckless enough to cause a serious accident is also likely to be the kind of driver who regards insurance (whether 3rd party or fully comprehensive), paying road tax or getting regular car servicing as not really that important.   Kind of like Bob Newhart’s Grace L Ferguson Airline & Storm Door Company that kept costs down by doing away with “frills and extras”  like radar and maintenance!
Road accidents involving untraceable or uninsured drivers are not uncommon, but if your property (like your own car or possessions) has been damaged you may still be able to make a claim for compensation.   In the UK, the MIB (Motor Insurers' Bureau - no they don’t wear dark suits and don’t have flashy memory-wipe thingies!) has a scheme that covers this scenario, provided you (or your solicitor) contacts them within nine months of the accident and reports it to the police no later than five days after the event.
The MIB will expect you to have already made reasonable efforts to trace the driver or insurer concerned by reporting the accident to the police and to your own insurance company and to have made enquiries of the DVLA about the registered owner of the vehicle.  If the driver remains untraced, you must at least be able to identify the vehicle type in order to make a claim for property damage and an excess of £300 is deducted from claims made under this untraced driver scheme.  The Motor Insurers' Bureau will only deal with claims registered with them within nine months of the accident.  They will also expect the accident to have been reported to the police within five days of the accident.


http://www.compensationclaims.net/accident-compensation/

4 comments:

  1. hi thats good article, very nice

    hi from mas raden

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  2. thanks....keep visiting for more !

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    Compensation Claims

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  4. Thanks for this information regarding road traffic accident Compensation. I think usually people are unaware of those things.

    ReplyDelete