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9th May 2006
Association of British Insurers’ stats should be handled with care, warn lawyers
Thompsons Solicitors, the UK’s leading claimant law firm, has called on the Association of British Insurers to come clean about its statistics that “prove” there are disproportionate costs in personal injury claims.
The firm has confirmation that the ABI based its claim that legal costs have increased by 40% - a figure which has been widely quoted as fact by the Lord Chancellor and numerous government ministers – on unrepresentative and unpublished research.
Nick Starling, the ABI’s director of general insurance, has admitted that the research which was presented as being independent was commissioned by the ABI among its own members, has never been published and the ABI has refused to allow Thompsons to see it.
Tom Jones of Thompsons said:
“The disproportionate influence the insurance industry has in the debate on costs is evident when it has been able to bandy around figures from a poll among a biased group, and have those figures taken as gospel. Nick Starling accused me in a letter to the insurance industry’s magazine of being wrong to question the ABI’s evidence on costs. He said that claimants' legal costs and disbursements, amounting to an additional 40p for every £1 paid in compensation, was calculated by independent researchers and not the ABI, and that this was accepted by the Lord Chancellor.
But when I asked to see the research, he refused. Nick Starling revealed that Deloitte's carried it out for the ABI among ABI members, that it was not published and is not publicly available. Apparently further research is being carried out, presumably because the first lot didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear. The ABI has misled a lot of people. There is no independent evidence and I hope that when they publish research from now on it is taken with a very large dose of salt. There are lies, damned lies and now, it appears, ABI statistics.”
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