On 04 May 2013 – a cold and windy day in Elgin – three of us from Grigor & Young / Moray Claims (Ann, Eileen and Peter), took a stall at the Scottish Theme Day run by Elgin Business Improvement District (Elgin BID). Thank you to everyone involved in organising it and all who participated.
We ran a competition where we asked people to give their valuation of the injury in the following scenario.
Female, aged 42, at the date of the injury and 45 at the date of the hearing, sustained a deep laceration on her posterior left thigh as a result of sitting on a toilet which had a jagged broken edge. The wound bled profusely and she was taken to hospital where it was sutured with seven stitches under local anaesthetic. Approximately two weeks later the wound became inflamed and antibiotics were prescribed. She was unable to work for 10 days and had difficulties sitting down or sleeping on her back for some six to eight weeks afterwards. She was left with a permanent scar measuring 3cm by 2mm which itched from time to time. She was conscious of the scar and no longer wore shorts or exposed that part of her leg to the sun. She remained nervous of using any toilet other than her own and always checked the rim for damage
The only hint we gave entrants was that the actual valuation was under £10,000.
The given facts are from the reported English case of Turner –v- Dale from the 1990s. Adjusting for inflation, the present value of the injury would be about £3,260.
We had two people as joint winners with valuations of £3,250. The highest valuation was £200,000 (!) and the lowest was £90 (yes, ninety).
The total number of competition entries was under a hundred (so, okay, it’s not exactly a large sample of opinion but it’s not going to put us off).
If we leave out of account the three people whose valuations exceeded £10,000 (the other two apart from the £200,000 valuation were both between £80,000 and £90,000), we have 84 entries to include in our analysis. In the following table, we break the answers down into £1,000 bands and show what percentage of valuations fell within each band.
|
Level of valuation
|
Percentage of entries with values in this band
|
|
£0 – £1,000
|
5%
|
|
£1,000 – £2,000
|
2.5%
|
|
£2,000 – £3,000
|
3.5%
|
|
£3,000 – £4,000
|
9.5%
|
|
£4,000 – £5,000
|
9.5%
|
|
£5,000 – £6,000
|
12%
|
|
£6,000 – £7,000
|
14%
|
|
£7,000 – £8,000
|
21.5%
|
|
£8,000 – £9,000
|
15.5%
|
|
£9,000 – £10,000
|
7%
|
Remember that no one got the valuation exactly right. We found that only 14% of entrants under-valued the claim, whereas 86% over-valued the claim.
The average valuation was just over £6,100 – or getting on for double the actual valuation assessed by the court in the reported case.
