Opinion: The Insurance Industry’s Shameful Delay Tactics Must End — A Solicitor’s View

In twenty-two years of practising personal injury law in London, I have never been more ashamed of the insurance industry than I am today. Day after day, I sit across from clients — ordinary Londoners who have been injured through no fault of their own — and watch them being ground down by an industry that has turned delay into an art form and obstruction into a business model. The tactics I witness are not occasional lapses in service; they are deliberate, systematic strategies designed to exhaust claimants into accepting settlements far below what they deserve.

Tactics I See Every Single Week

Let me describe what a typical claimant experiences. First, their claim is acknowledged promptly — insurers are very good at meeting the initial regulatory deadlines. Then the delays begin. Medical reports are challenged and re-examination demanded, adding months. Liability is disputed on spurious grounds, even when the insurer's own policyholder has admitted fault. Claims handlers change repeatedly, requiring the claimant to re-explain their injuries and circumstances each time. Offers, when they finally come, are deliberately pitched at 30-40 per cent below reasonable value, knowing that a financially desperate claimant may accept rather than wait another year.

I recently acted for a nurse from Lewisham who was rear-ended at a red light on the South Circular. She suffered a herniated disc that required surgery and kept her off work for seven months. Liability was indisputable — the other driver was texting and admitted this to police. Yet it took the insurer 26 months to make a reasonable settlement offer. During that time, my client fell into debt, suffered clinical depression, and nearly lost her home. The insurer's final payment included no acknowledgement of the harm their delay had caused.

The Systemic Nature of the Problem

This is not about individual claims handlers behaving badly. It is about an institutional culture in which delay is incentivised. Insurance companies invest premium income — every month a claim remains unpaid, the insurer earns interest on the money it should have paid out. Industry analysts estimate that the major motor insurers collectively hold between £3-5 billion in unpaid claim reserves at any given time. At current interest rates, the investment income on those reserves is substantial. Delay is not a bug in the system; it is a profit centre.

The Financial Conduct Authority's Consumer Duty, introduced in 2023, was supposed to address these practices by requiring firms to deliver good outcomes for consumers. Yet three years on, FCA enforcement action against insurers for claims handling delays remains vanishingly rare. The regulator has imposed precisely two fines for motor claims handling failures in the past 24 months. Two. For an industry processing over 2.5 million claims annually.

The Human Cost Is Unconscionable

What makes this most galling is the human cost. My clients are teachers, bus drivers, shop workers, and pensioners. They are people who were going about their daily lives when someone else's negligence changed everything. They deserve to be treated with dignity and compensated fairly within a reasonable timeframe. Instead, they are treated as liabilities to be managed and minimised.

The Reforms We Need Now

I am calling for three immediate reforms. First, statutory time limits for claims resolution — 90 days for liability decisions and 180 days for quantum settlement in straightforward cases, with automatic penalty interest for non-compliance. Second, the FCA must establish a dedicated insurance claims handling enforcement unit with the resources and mandate to impose meaningful sanctions. Third, claimants must be given the right to recover their full legal costs where an insurer's unreasonable delay has necessitated litigation. The insurance industry will argue these measures are disproportionate. I would argue that what is truly disproportionate is an industry that generates £45 billion in annual premium income while systematically delaying justice for the people it is supposed to serve.