Scams, Claims and Compensation Games
February 26, 2010
Last night Channel 4 aired an episode of their long-running, hard-hitting, documentary series "Cutting Edge", which was supposed to lift the lid on the personal injury industry and expose the compensation culture which is apparently crippling the country and costing the taxpayer millions of pounds a year. In fact, what we got was a programme focused on the most outlandish of claims and, unsurprisingly, not on the hundreds of thousands of people that make genuine compensation claims each year. Of course, why would they, this is not what makes good television! For those of us on the inside of the industry, it is clear that this programme did not represent a true reflection of the way many personal injury claims are run; however, the footage was edited in such a believable way that you could see why people would believe it to be so. The sheer amount of screen time devoted to a claim by a woman who was injured in the mum's race at her child's school sports day, when the claim did not go anywhere (a fact that was briefly touched on right at the end), was one of the most frustrating parts of the programme. It is documentaries like this that fuel the "compensation culture", not genuine, hard-working solicitors like ourselves.