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Anonymous @26 November 2015 03:29 pm
If you are poor and then you are in many ways more vulnerable. - You are far more likely to be using an older car with fewer safety features, so more likely to be injured if you are involved in a relatively minor accident.
- You will, in many cases, be in poorer health to start with so likely to have less resilance
- You are more likely to be working on a zero hours contract or other poorly paid job so as more likely to return to work bfore you are fully healed
- you are more likely to have a physically demanding job where an injury such as whiplash has a far greater practical impact than if you have a desk job.
- the costs involved in being injured are much bigger in real terms, and therfore comaparatively small additional expenses are far more likely to push you from being able to manage, to being either in debt or in need (or both)
- the compensation is more important. For someone earning £50-£60K, getting £2,500 compensation for a minor injury would be nice. For someone earnong £12K a year it could make a huge difference. So the person on £50 - £60K is more likely to decide it isn't worth the bother to pursue it.

I think part ofthe probelm is that MPs have no real grasp of how big an impact an 'minor' injury can have on someone, nor of how daunting many people would find it to try to deal with insurers and courts etc as LIPs, nor of how importnat comparatively small amounts of money can be if you don't have much.
So far as courts are concerned, the abolistion of legal aid for family cases and the increase in LIPs shows some of the problems inherent in trying to get legal advisors out of legal work - huge delays, lots of cases dragging on far longer than they should because a LIP hasn't been advised about their case, Judges trying to balance the ineqities of one party being unrepresetned without losing their impartiality - why would this work any better in a PI claim than it does in a family case?