Inflation, The Judicial College Guidelines And Assessing General Damages.

• Published date: 06 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Insurance, Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration, Insurance Laws and Products, Personal Injury
• Law Firm: Weightmans
• Author: Mr Emmett Boyce

In a time of rampant inflation, we consider the approach of the court in the case of Blair v Jaber when assessing general damages in PI cases

The Judicial College Guidelines

The Judicial College publishes a set of guidelines at regular intervals which set out to assist judges, practitioners, and insurers in the valuation of general damages for personal injuries. The most recent guidelines are the sixteenth edition published in April 2022.

The guidelines separate injury types and give a monetary bracket as to how each should be valued depending upon the severity of the injuries sustained and prognosis. In terms of the brackets themselves, the Judicial College states that these are a distillation of awards of damages being made by the courts. However, the guidelines seek to bring a consistency to awards and are generally followed in personal injury litigation.

It should also be noted that the guidelines are reviewed before every new edition and adjusted to take into account the Retail Price Index.

The question of valuation of an injury, the current rate of inflation and the effect on the guidelines was considered by the court recently in Blair v Jaber.

Blair v Jaber

Mr Blair brought a claim for personal injuries sustained because of a road traffic accident in October 2020. The claim came before Recorder Jack in the Coventry Combined Court on 8 March 2023.

When it came to the question of valuation of Mr Blair's injuries, the guidelines were utilised by the court, as is standard practice. However, the judge noted that the current guidelines had been published on 11 April 2022, nearly a year before, and "(s)ince then, we have had inflation such as has not been seen since the 1970s."

The judge noted that the guidelines do not consider future inflation and gave consideration as to whether the figures within the guidelines needed to be increased to take the significant affects of inflation into account.

...