Presumed liability petition

[slowster]

Oh well. It was only a junior at the MIB.

I should also have added that the MIB deals with only two relatively small subsets of motor accidents/insurance claims: those involving uninsured drivers and untraced drivers where there is serious injury or death. It's not suprising that someone who spends much of their time dealing with just those two categories thinks that hit and run claims are statistically more important than is actually the case. They won't have access to the statistics of motor insurers covering all types of loss, including collisions, carelessness with no other party involved, theft etc., and nor will they have detailed insight into insurers' pricing models (certainly not enough to be able confidently to make the assertion to you that they did).

[thirdcrank]

There do seem to be some beliefs about how motor insurance makes people drive more carefully when a big problem for insurers of every type is to try to er... ensure that being indemnified against a risk doesn't make their insured act in a more risky manner. Then, estimates of uninsured vehicles in the UK do seem surprisingly high, given things like ANPR and the fairly new police power to seize uninsured vehicles.

... there are still an estimated one million uninsured vehicles in Great Britain, meaning that one in every 38 vehicles on the road is uninsured.

https://www.mib.org.uk/media-centre/new ... 0uninsured.

Some of those "on the road" will not be being driven. There will be some cases where that occurs through genuine error but that number will be relatively small. The rest are people who decide the risk of punishment is worth the risk. They may drive very cautiously to avoid detection or play dodgems.

[mattheus]

...
Funding motor insurance by adding it to fuel costs will result in good drivers subsidising poor and dangerous drivers. Bad drivers will have less incentive to improve and be more careful for fear that their premiums will increase, and there will be no commercial disincentive or bar to their driving high performance cars (for which insurers would charge discouragingly high premiums, or would even refuse to cover because of the unacceptably high risk).
...

Yeah, I can see that is a drawback.

So you would prefer Presumed Liability? To me, it seems to have the least drawbacks.

[mattheus]

There do seem to be some beliefs about how motor insurance makes people drive more carefully when a big problem for insurers of every type is to try to er... ensure that being indemnified against a risk doesn't make their insured act in a more risky manner. Then, estimates of uninsured vehicles in the UK do seem surprisingly high, given things like ANPR and the fairly new police power to seize uninsured vehicles.

... there are still an estimated one million uninsured vehicles in Great Britain, meaning that one in every 38 vehicles on the road is uninsured.

https://www.mib.org.uk/media-centre/new ... 0uninsured.

Some of those "on the road" will not be being driven. There will be some cases where that occurs through genuine error but that number will be relatively small. The rest are people who decide the risk of punishment is worth the risk. They may drive very cautiously to avoid detection or play dodgems.

The damage they do is enormous (certainly more than the "scourge of the streets" - uninsured lycra-clad cyclists!).

The figure (from that site) is one person in the UK being injured every 20 minutes (by uninsured or hit-n-run drivers).

(130 deaths a year)

[slowster]

So you would prefer Presumed Liability? To me, it seems to have the least drawbacks.

My opinion hasn't changed since the previous thread:

viewtopic.php?p=1519074#p1519074

viewtopic.php?p=1519265#p1519265

[mattheus]

So you would prefer Presumed Liability? To me, it seems to have the least drawbacks.

My opinion hasn't changed since the previous thread:

viewtopic.php?p=1519074#p1519074

viewtopic.php?p=1519265#p1519265

Good stuff.

(you could have just said YES you know!

[thirdcrank]

The figure (from that site) is one person in the UK being injured every 20 minutes (by uninsured or hit-n-run drivers).

And the discussion here is about presumed liability. I'm sure that many people - including plenty of drivers - would agree that prompt payment of compo for injuries sustained in collisions would be a good thing and avoiding survivors' justice would be another. I'm at a loss to see how it might reduce or better still eliminate death and injury caused by uninsured drivers or those who drove off before their insurance status could be ascertained.

[atlas_shrugged]

thirdcrank I think you are right that Presumed liability will not help the problem of uninsured drivers. That is probably my fault for hijacking my own thread as I mentioned the idea of putting 3rd party insurance onto extra fuel tax to try and get the tight-fisted little blighters that won't pay insurance to at least pay something towards 3rd party insurance via their fuel payments.

[thirdcrank]

I really do believe that tackling uninsured drivers - 'cracking down on' in the lingo - would be a worthwhile and attainable goal. The only naysayers would be the uninsured drivers. Everybody else is a winner. My only doubt is that the extent of uninsured driving is already regularly publicised and lots of people including insured drivers are regularly on the receiving end but don't make much fuss.

There's some policing by social media trying to convince everybody that it's being robustly dealt with but the data linked above suggest it isn't. To make what I'm saying clear: there is some robust action in the form of the seizure of uninsured vehicles in some individual cases - it usually figures in any episode of a Left, left, left, right, right, right, heck, heck, heck, we've had a crash, crash, crash police chase programme - but large-scale uninsured driving persists.

I suspect there are simply insufficient police resources devoted to this. AIUI, automatic number plate recognition systems (ANPR) linked to the relevant database are now up to the task of detecting these offences; it just needs the personnel to be available to deal with them.

And yes, it's a question of priorities so something else would receive less priority, but my point would be without campaigning pressure, traffic policing will deteriorate further as more resources are devoted to protecting the feelings of geese online from people going "Boo."
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adit. There must be some uninsured through an error. It would benefit those concerned to correct it. There must be some in real hardship who can get to work no other way, with insurance being down their list of priority bills. However, I'll jump to the conclusion that driving an uninsured car is generally a sign that the driver is disqualified from driving, which may be why so many scarper from crashes or try to outrun the police.

[atlas_shrugged]

There are too many uninsured drivers now. Having one police car just to catch one uninsured driver is too expensive, then you need to add the costs of the legal system and prison system etc etc etc.

It is far cheaper to make sure they pay for 3rd party insurance via their fuel payments which are already taxed. That way they never offend in the first place.

[Jdsk]

There are too many uninsured drivers now. Having one police car just to catch one uninsured driver is too expensive, then you need to add the costs of the legal system and prison system etc etc etc.

It is far cheaper to make sure they pay for 3rd party insurance via their fuel payments which are already taxed. That way they never offend in the first place.

Would that only be for personal injury and death, or include damage to inanimate objects?

How would it be raised for electric vehicles?

Thanks

Jonathan

[thirdcrank]

There are too many uninsured drivers now. Having one police car just to catch one uninsured driver is too expensive, then you need to add the costs of the legal system and prison system etc etc etc.

It is far cheaper to make sure they pay for 3rd party insurance via their fuel payments which are already taxed. That way they never offend in the first place.

As a general principle, I think that piling everything on the price of fuel is a good idea. The fuel price escalator was a step in that direction started in 1993 - although not covering insurance. Although it's never been repealed, it's been dead for a decade so perhaps not one to back as a runner, especially as petrol and diesel are on the way out. Also if everything is on the fuel ie including vehicle excise duty, then there's little disincentive currently for non-runners being parked permanently on the road.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_Price_Escalator

While I'm all for decent, prompt compo for victims of crashes, I persist in the view that prevention is immeasurably preferable to any amount of compo. There is a view in some official quarters that the visible presence of patrolling police has little effect on offending; be that as it may, nobody who has ever driven a can car fail to notice the effect on driver behaviour of liveried police cars. I can see that if somebody takes the view that police vehicles and their drivers are part of the problem then they won't favour an increase.

Obviously, if it was impossible to drive without insurance, it would mean "they never offend in the first place" but only in respect of insurance: they could continue carry on committing other offences that endanger other road users.

I'm not a criminologist, but they do say that certainty of detection is a bigger deterrent than severity of punishment; at the moment there's little prospect of detection or punishment for bad driving.

I suspect that in some quarters there's a belief that cycling conditions are good in Spain → they have presumed liability in Spain → presumed liability = Holy Grail. I know little of Spain but my hero Judge Javier Borrego Borrego hails from there and he seems to give motoring offenders short shrift. I also think that Spain is one of those countries with para-military police who are not recruited to be nice to people. I fancy that those things affect conditions for cyclists more than the compo system. And I'm not suggesting we need more para-military police: just a change in priorities.
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There's some policing by social media trying to convince everybody that it's being robustly dealt with but the data linked above suggest it isn't.

Here's an example:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/england?ns_m ... type=share

[qwerty360]

A few points for people.

Presumed liability still requires both sides prove things - it is more like libel.

Under current laws a claimant has to prove the accident happened, damage occured and the other party was negligent.

With presumed liability only the last of these 3 disappears for one party because there is an automatic bias towards the more powerful user being at fault, partly because they have a greater duty of care and partly because stats show this is normally the case. They can still defend or counter claim on the basis that the less powerful user was negligent...

We already have laws that work like this - For libel and slander I don't have to prove you lied. Just that you made a statement that caused me harm. This also applies to injury at work claims effectively iirc. (The employer has a duty of care - the fact that you were injured is strong evidence that they failed...)

Some data suggests this would actually make insurance cheaper as insurers not irregularly spend money disputing claims where either they are fairly likely to lose, or the claim amounts are relatively small, and they already will pay most claims... (I have had one where the insurer folded after the driver provided their own dash cam footage that the driver claimed 'proved' I was at fault... The insurer had to disabuse them of this notion and point out it showed they were fully at fault...)

Another argument for presumed liability is the rules that limit court costs for insurance claims. This makes it much harder for those without mandatory insurance to claim... For car insurance it mostly reduced insurers shuffling money back and forth for various claims against each other (which probably mostly broke even across a few years), but it makes it much harder for vulnerable road users, particularly given that it doesn't apply to your side if you don't follow procedures, basically requiring that you have a lawyer to get protected from the insurer persuing you for massive costs if you lose, but you can't claim the costs from them! Presumed liability would be a good counterweight to this (which exists to try and keep claims out of the courts because courts are expensive to provide).

[emt15]

I would go one step ahead an change the wording to cyclists regardless of fault must be compensated because we are more vulnerable. On a car it is just a scratch who cares? Motorists will keep whinging for no reason they need to banned from the roads completely.

[Grumpy-Grandad]

I would go one step ahead an change the wording to cyclists regardless of fault must be compensated because we are more vulnerable. On a car it is just a scratch who cares? Motorists will keep whinging for no reason they need to banned from the roads completely.

This made me laugh so much
I do like it when something brightens up my day like this