Sometimes an insurer or loss adjuster’s behaviour is so unacceptable – and they will not apparently listen to any reasoning – that the only way you can have a chance of getting their attention is to call them out publicly for their behaviour.
This article is about a situation we have encountered with insurers and loss adjusters where they will not give us sufficient information in relation to a claim – in which they are denying liability – to enable us to advise our client whether or not the denial of liability is reasonable.
We investigate many potential claims where the evidence the opponent produces shows that the claim’s chances of success are poor.
It is to be expected that not all personal injury compensation claims can be successful. No solicitor will mind that, provided the opponent provides the solicitor with sufficient evidence for the solicitor to be able to understand the denial of liability and explain it to you, as the injured client.
In cases which involve people suffering injury after tripping in the street, all we can do at the initial stage is scout out the locus – as soon as possible – and see whether the defect that has caused them to trip is beyond the threshold for what the law might consider to be “dangerous”.
Often we will use a Pound coin set on its end (which has a diameter or “height” of 23 mm) to show that the height difference where our client tripped was probably more than 25 mm (i.e. one inch or so), which is a good indicator that the defect was “dangerous, according to the law”.
But that information on its own is not enough as you usually require to be able to show for how long the defect has been present, before the accident, and in that condition.
It can be difficult to get evidence as to how long a pavement has been in a “dangerous” condition but digital assistance can be provided by things like Google Streetview in some situations.
In most cases, it will depend on the records kept by the local authority.
We are unlikely to know whether anyone complained about the defect before our client’s accident took place – i.e. such that the local authority were alerted to the problem and should have investigated the issue and repaired the defect before the accident had a chance to occur.
Local authorities have their own duties of inspection of roadways and pavements and, in broad terms, the frequency with which they should inspect a particular locus will depend on how much traffic – vehicular and pedestrian – that location is likely to get. A location in the centre of Elgin, Moray, might have to be inspected every 3 months or 6 months (or even monthly) whereas a rural location may only reasonably need to be inspected every year.
In a situation where we have a client who has tripped because of a defect which we can show was “dangerous” at the time of their fall, it is up to the local authority or the owner of the place where the trip took place to demonstrate that, nevertheless, they took reasonable care.
A further complicating factor with some pavement accidents is that certain manhole covers and other street “furniture” are not the responsibility of the local authority but of a particular utilities provider, which could be a mobile phone company or electricity/gas/water company.
In the particular situation we have, which involves a client tripping beside a manhole cover in New Elgin, it appears that we have a question between the Moray Council as the local authority and Vodafone as the utility company which has responsibility for the manhole cover and its immediate surroundings.
As far as we can tell – although it has never been specifically confirmed in the present case – the local authority carries out periodic inspections and where they identify a defect which would be the responsibility of a utility company to repair, they have an agreement with the utility company that they will report the matter to them so the utility company can fix it.
The accident with which we are dealing occurred in the middle of October 2024.
We initially intimated the claim to the Moray Council because there was no obvious sign that the defect was not their responsibility. This was at the beginning of November 2024. They passed our letter to their public liability insurers, Zürich Insurance.
After carrying out investigations, Zurich came back to us by letter in December 2024 to tell us that the manhole cover that caused our client’s injury was owned by Vodafone Limited.
We therefore intimated our client’s claim to Vodafone immediately. We heard back from Sedgwick International UK as liability adjusters on behalf of Vodafone at the end of January 2025. Sedgwick eventually denied liability by email in mid-June 2025.
Sedgwick have provided confirmation that the locus was inspected after our client’s accident and after our client reported their accident to the local authority.
Sedgwick have not provided any information regarding the inspection regime of the Council and when, for example, the most recent inspection of the locus before the date of our client’s accident took place and what the findings of that inspection were.
We have made numerous requests to them for this obviously-necessary information, without success.
We have pointed out both to Zurich and to Sedgwick that the position is not acceptable and they cannot expect us to accept a denial of liability which is not supported by reasonable evidence.
We have had to threaten that we will raise a court action on behalf of our client against Vodafone on the basis that no evidence has been provided to support Vodafone’s contention that they satisfied their duty of care in the circumstances and we will have to apply for an early disclosure of documentation in the court action to obtain material which should have been disclosed voluntarily many weeks ago.
We want to emphasise that we have no basis in evidence to suggest that there have been any failures in providing information to their representatives either by Moray Council or by Vodafone.
In the end, these entities rely on their insurers and those appointed by their insurers to do their job properly.
We should all be entitled to expect that insurers will provide reasonable evidence to support their conclusions to anyone making a personal injury claim (or to their advisers) in the event that they decide that liability is to be denied in a case involving a person tripping in the street and suffering injury.
The attitude of the insurance industry in this case is worrying from our point of view. It suggests an unusually blatant unwillingness to play fair or by the rules and an unwillingness to behave reasonably.
We hope that by publicising the circumstances it might encourage the particular players in this case to review their position and provide the information to which we say that we and our client are reasonably entitled.
