Injuries: Official Injury Claim portal is not easy to use
The “justice gap” for personal injury victims is “dramatically widening” and 2.3m people every year are increasingly unlikely to seek redress, a report has found.
The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) said 44% of negligence victims did not claim compensation and only a fifth approached a personal injury lawyer.
Researchers estimated that a total of 7.5m negligence victims had “never claimed compensation”.
When it came to road traffic accidents, casualties had increased by 11% between 2020, the year before the whiplash reforms were introduced, and 2025 but the number of PI claims had fallen by 43%.
Since the reforms, the proportion of claimants finding the compensation process “very stressful” had increased by 23 percentage points to 71%, while almost seven out of 10 consumers were not aware of the government’s Official Injury Claim (OIC) portal for claims worth less than £5,000.
For every 10 claims made to the OIC by people without the help of lawyers, more than six calls were made to the OIC’s support centre. “This astonishingly high number of calls shows just how much the system is not the easy-to-use process promised.”
APIL based The justice gap facing victims of negligence on its own data and opinion polls.
Researchers said more people were being injured or becoming ill in the workplace, yet “far fewer” were claiming compensation.
The proportion of workers who suffered a work-related injury which led to more than seven days’ absence or became ill because of their work rose by 34% between 2018/19 and 2024/2025, but there was a drop of 51% in compensation claims.
Meanwhile, victims of clinical negligence were waiting, on average, 10 months longer for their claims to settle when compared to 2013/14. Those with the highest-value clinical negligence claims were waiting over eight years.
APIL described fixed recoverable costs as a “growing barrier to justice” because “the legal costs of pursuing a claim increasingly exceed what can be recovered from the wrongdoer”.
This was particularly the case with more complex claims and meant that lawyers were “unable to support an increasing number of victims who approach them for help”.
In many cases, victims had to make up this shortfall from their compensation. Research with employer’s liability lawyers found that asking injured people to cover this shortfall “deters them from taking their claim forward”.
Lawyers told APIL that “more aggressive defendant behaviour” was another barrier to justice.
“Defendants’ increased use of unmerited fundamental dishonesty allegations has made victims fearful and intimidated them into not taking their claims forward.”
People injured at work feared that claiming compensation would endanger their livelihood, acting as a “powerful deterrent to approaching a PI lawyer”. Even after talking to a lawyer, “some victims drop their claim because of these fears”.
APIL said the growing justice gap did not just harm victims of negligence, but it also had a “significant financial impact on wider society too”.
A drop in compensation claims increased the amount the government spent on benefits “because more people do not have access to the rehabilitation, financed by compensation, that could help them return to work”.
Fewer injured accident victims in work also meant that tax receipts fell, “affecting us all”.
The NHS was also harmed by the justice gap, since it could not recover the victim’s treatment costs from the wrongdoer where no claim was made.
Researchers estimated that, since 2021, NHS finances had been “hit by almost £300m” because of the collapse in road traffic claims.
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