Car Insurance - Third Party Claims and The Blame Culture

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Car Insurance - The Blame Culture

We could write a book here about the 'common law tort of negligence'. There are plenty of legal text books available which when deciphered tell us that it basically boils down to 'use your common sense, and that is a good way to form an opinion of who is to blame.

Let's just qualify that a little. In order to be negligent you must:

1) owe a duty of care - e.g. you owe a duty of care to other road users. But do you owe a duty of care to the man half a mile away on a bus, which gets held up in the resultant traffic jam, not to make him late home from work? No - it is too remote. So your duty of care is to the road users around and about you.

2) you have to cause a breach of that duty.

3) the breach of duty has to flow from the duty of care

4) your breach of your duty of care has to cause damage/injury.

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In a recent case the third party had already had his car written off in a previous accident. But he was still driving it when along came our customer and crashed into him. Our customer had been negligent and the first 3 of the above rules were met. But was the damage caused in the crash? There was certainly damage to the third party car but there was no loss in value because the car was only worth scrap value to start with.

"In an attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole. "

Extracts taken from actual claim forms submitted to a number of UK car insurance companies

Next..... Car Insurance Claims - Apportioning Blame

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