‘Big push’ to clear RTA portal backlog

Some personal injury firms handling road traffic accident (RTA) claims are still waiting to be plugged into a new electronic data exchange nearly a month after it launched, due to a backlog of login requests.

Introduced as part of Ministry of Justice reforms to speed up the processing of hundreds of thousands of RTA claims between £1,000 and £10,000 and reduce their cost, the portal is intended to act as a secure data exchange for claims.

Figures from portal software developers CRIF showed that, by Monday of this week, 2,100 claims had been submitted via the portal, up from 617 on Monday 17 May. CRIF said that, of these 2,100 claims, liability had been admitted by insurers in 1,256 cases, and denied in 112 cases. In total, more than 8,000 claims notification forms had been created on the system by Monday, up from 3,000 on 17 May, according to CRIF’s report.

However, Tim Wallis, independent chairman of the RTA portal project steering group, said that while there will be a ‘big push’ to clear a backlog of unsent login details by Friday, some firms might still be waiting for login details next week.

‘The introduction of this portal has been a bit of a bumpy ride,’ he said. ‘It has been a massive IT project carried out in a short timescale. The current situation is regrettable and the project steering group is as unhappy as anyone else.’

He said a revised and improved helpdesk will be set up by 7 June because ‘the level of problems was not forecast to be of this volume.’

Replying to complaints from some solicitors that their profitability has been hit by the technical problems, Wallis said: ‘We need to look at profitability on a longer-term basis. We sense from the claims already dealt with that there can some very big savings.’

A representative of Insurance Database Services Limited, which manages the portal, said on Tuesday that 97% of the motor insurance market is now on the portal and the remaining 3% are being contacted and asked to sign up.

Solicitors access the portal via their web browser or via upgraded case management software. As the Gazette went to press, because of delayed software testing, some firms using the case management software route could submit a claim to an insurer, but could not progress to ‘stage two’, where, if the insurer accepts liability, the parties agree on damages. Many firms have been advised by their case management software providers not to use the portal until all user testing has been signed off.