My interest in this area stems from a very minor accident that my wife and I had a few years ago, I think, on the M5. We had a minor collision, and for a year after that I was phoned on my mobile on almost a weekly basis by a claims management company trying to get me to submit a fraudulent personal injury claim. No matter how often I told them that I, my wife and my children had no neck injury, they insisted on trying to incite me to manufacture or claim that I had such an injury with the purpose of making a fraudulent claim. I was told, “You can get £3,000 for just saying your neck hurts.” Even as recently as the past two weeks, my wife and I have both separately
had automated phone calls—robo-phone calls—from claims management companies asking us to phone back if we think we have ever been involved in an accident.
That experience prompted me to look further into this subject, and colleagues have cited some of the figures. The hon. Member for Jarrow (Mr Hepburn) asked where the evidence is that there is a problem with widespread fraudulent claims. I have my own anecdotal experience of being personally incited to commit fraud, which obviously I did not do, but the figures are compelling. Over the past decade, the number of road traffic accidents has fallen by 31%, so how can it be that personal injury claims have increased by 50%? The answer is of course that these claims management companies are farming claims and inciting people to commit fraud, as they did with me.