Nicholas Bevan continues his series on compensating RTA victims & finds our national law provision wanting
The terms, scope and workings of the UK government’s compensation guarantee has preoccupied legislators, the judiciary and legal practitioners alike since the first Road Traffic Act introduced in 1930 (RTA 1930). In the UK this provision has evolved over the years to produce four distinct compensatory safety nets. The first two consist of statutory rights. Between them, they confer on a victim a direct right to recover compensation from the defendant’s insurer and they are to be found within Pt VI of the Road Traffic Act 1988 (RTA 1988). The third and fourth are delivered by a completely different route: through two extra-statutory compensation schemes devised specifically for victims of uninsured and unidentified drivers. The distinction between the two different types of scheme (statutory and extra-statutory) is relevant to the way one interprets them because different rules of construction are said to apply. This article concentrates on the first two statutory schemes.
The contractual insurer
Of the two statutory schemes, the first confers
