Motor Insurer's Bureau (MIB) and Road Traffic Accident Victims

AlexEB

Hi everyone, I'm wondering if you've had any trouble with the Motor Insurer's Bureau (MIB)?

The MIB are the UK's safety-net insurance company that all motorists pay into when they renew their car insurance. It's a government quango setup in the 1940s to compensate road traffic victims of uninsured drivers and untraced drivers.

My beef:

• Lethargic six week case handling turn around time resulting in many years before you receive compensation. This results in mental health degradation.
• Inhuman and uncaring attitude to victims of road traffic accidents
• Sending medical information by unencrypted email without password protecting attachments
• Not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) so no normal ombudsman to protect victims.
• They essentially get to "mark their own homework"
• You have to complain to the Minister for Transport if you have a problem with them, such as uncovering evidence of unethical behaviour.

If you haven't heard of them then you are very lucky because you've never had to apply to them for compensation.

Please do comment if you've had a POSITIVE experience with them, as well as a negative experience.

They process 25,000 to 35,000 claims at a time, so I'm wondering IS IT JUST ME?! 

Thanks all! 🙏 

mjm3346

Had dealings with them in the 1990s and a few years either side of that decade - had no issues with them but over that time did see a few people who were just trying it on who deserved and got nothing and almost certainly would have got the same for their alleged "accident" even if they were insured

DullGreyGuy

AlexEB said:

Hi everyone, I'm wondering if you've had any trouble with the Motor Insurer's Bureau (MIB)?

The MIB are the UK's safety-net insurance company that all motorists pay into when they renew their car insurance. It's a government quango setup in the 1940s to compensate road traffic victims of uninsured drivers and untraced drivers.

My beef:

• Lethargic six week case handling turn around time resulting in many years before you receive compensation. This results in mental health degradation.
• Inhuman and uncaring attitude to victims of road traffic accidents
• Sending medical information by unencrypted email without password protecting attachments
• Not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) so no normal ombudsman to protect victims.
• They essentially get to "mark their own homework"
• You have to complain to the Minister for Transport if you have a problem with them, such as uncovering evidence of unethical behaviour.

If you haven't heard of them then you are very lucky because you've never had to apply to them for compensation.

Please do comment if you've had a POSITIVE experience with them, as well as a negative experience.

They process 25,000 to 35,000 claims at a time, so I'm wondering IS IT JUST ME?! 

Thanks all! 🙏 

It is a safety net but it does ultimately still represent the third party even if they are unknown or uninsured

• They're a public body with public body levels of funding, motor claims in general are frequently slow and no one is going to want to pay an extra £25 a year in insurance premiums just so the MIB has more staff. In many cases its doctors and lawyers etc that are what's slowing things down not the insurer/MIB

• Their role is to defend the third party and ensure non-fault claimants are appropriate indemnified, they dont represent you, they aren't there to be nice to you

• In this day and age its wrong, in my claims days it was all sent by snail mail and equally was unencrypted or protected in any way were someone to want to intercept it and read it

• You wouldn't have ombudsman rights were you claiming from the third party insurer either... the ombudsman is there to protect the rights of customers only. The FCA is similar, there to ensure customers are treated fairly but the MIB's only customers are corporate entities wanting access to its databases etc and so no FCA regulation is required

• No, the court gets to mark their home work, again in the exact same way as if you were claiming from a third party insurer and didnt like the offer they made to you etc

• Thats an improvement over you being a third party to an insurer where you cannot complain to anyone at all and have to go to court 

Fundamentally you misunderstand their role, they act in exactly the same was as if the third party was known and had insurance. They do have some additional challenges because they often cannot "speak" to their client because they are untraced. Both insurers and the MIB have equal challenges when dealing with someone who is for all intents and purposes uninsured (eg drunk driver) because in both cases after paying out the money to the claimant they have to attempt to get the money back from their client which typically doesn't make them particularly cooperative as witnesses etc


As a former claims handler have dealt with the MIB many times either because there's been challenges to if we were the RTA insurer or not or because an incident involved a foreign vehicle. They are at times slow but generally ultimately get there.