Are courts ignoring “get tough” policy considerations in favour of justice where fraud is suspected, asks David Sawtell
Fraud is big business. The House of Commons’ Transport Committee Report into the cost of motor insurance heard evidence that that the insurance industryloses £2.1bn per annum to fraud. Some 30,000 staged road traffic accidents took place in 2009. The criminal conspiracies behind the resulting claims are frequently sophisticated. It should come as no surprise that the courts have been very busy grappling with the resulting legal issues.
At first blush it might be surprising, therefore, that the courts have allowed genuine claims to proceed even where the claimants have “supported” dishonest claims—the so-called “phantom passengers”. In Summers v Fairclough Homes [2010] EWCA Civ 1300 the Court of Appeal held that the law was now very clear: the court should allow the genuine claims rather than striking them out as an “abuse of process”. The case of Shah v Ul-Haq and others [2010] 1 All ER 73, where a husband and wife in a car accident had falsely supported the phantom claim of the husband’s
