Insurers are ‘abusing’ the scheme designed to speed up low-value road traffic accident (RTA) personal injury cases, solicitors said this week.

The claims cast doubt on Lord Young’s assertion in his recent report on the ‘compensation culture’ that the RTA process ‘provides a model of how an effective system should work’, and that it should be extended to other areas of personal injury.

The RTA claims process was introduced in April at the behest of the Ministry of Justice, to speed up the processing of claims under £10,000. As part of the process, solicitors initially submit claims data to insurers through an online portal.

But lawyers have claimed that, in an ‘abuse’ of the system, insurers are instructing their own panel firms to submit victims’ claims to them through the portal – even where the victim has already chosen another firm to represent them.

Claimant solicitors also said that some insurers are repeatedly failing to respond to claims within the timescales laid down by the MoJ, meaning that large numbers of claims are exiting the portal unnecessarily, and slowing the system down.

The Motor Accident Solicitors Society (MASS) said it is investigating the claims. MASS chair John Spencer, a member of the RTA stakeholder group, said that if MASS finds the abuse is occurring on a wide scale, it will file complaints with the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the portal administrators. He said he already has ‘anecdotal evidence’ of the abuse.

An Association of British Insurers (ABI) spokesman said the ABI is aware that large numbers of claims are exiting the system, but is unaware of insurers instructing law firms to submit claims to them on behalf of victims when they already have a solicitor.

Nicholas O’Neill, a partner at national firm The Specter Partnership, said: ‘There is a real split between insurers that are portal friendly, and those that are either unable to adhere to the timetables or can’t be bothered.’

Spencer said that there was a ‘diversity of experience’ among MASS members regarding the percentage of claims exiting the system due to the insurer’s failure to respond, with some reporting a 10% exit rate, and others reporting 90%. He estimated that, overall, around 30% of claims are exiting the process when they should not be.

An Association of Personal Injury Lawyers spokeswoman said that concerns about insurers’ practices in relation to the portal had also been raised by its members.

In his report on the ‘compensation culture’ published last week, Lord Young recommended that the government should export the RTA claims process to other types of personal injury claims, and to lower value clinical negligence cases.

Spencer said he has written to Young, warning of the dangers of such a move. He said there are ‘a number of issues that need resolving’ with the RTA process, and that ‘other types of personal injury claim have different complexities’.