Personal Injury Claims Numbers Hit Record Lows

The number of personal injuries recorded fell to record lows in 2025, according to the latest data from the government’s Compensation Recovery Unit (CRU), obtained by the Association of Consumer Support Organisations (ACSO) following a Freedom of Information request. 

The decline in volumes was led by a precipitous fall in motor injury claims, with only 63,833 registered in the fourth quarter of 2025, comfortably the lowest quarterly figures on record and down 24 per cent from the equivalent period in 2025, when there were 83,609 motor claims.

On a year-on-year basis, motor claims were down from 328,637 in 2024 to 282,428 in 2025, a 14 per cent fall, while the number for all types of personal injury claim fell from 467,783 in 2024 to 413,323, a 12 per cent fall. By way of comparison, in 2018 there were 876,562 claims in total, of which 667,377 were motor claims, meaning a 53 per cent fall in all claims and a 58 per cent fall in motor.

Matthew Maxwell-Scott, Executive Director of ACSO, said:

“While our roads have not become notably safer places in recent years, it has become far harder for people to make a claim when they are injured on them, especially as a result of the Ministry of Justice’s whiplash reforms.

“Ministers and officials may claim this as a victory, but unless and until the considerable savings being made are being passed on to motorists through materially lower insurance premiums, it’s a win for insurers’ shareholders and them alone. The gulf between what was promised and what’s being delivered should have received far greater attention from the government’s Motor Insurance Taskforce, but instead this was largely a damp squib. We must hope the ongoing review of the whiplash reforms highlights this discrepancy. 

“The latest data also show that talk of a ‘compensation culture’ is increasingly misplaced, with many injured people struggling to get the representation they need as a result of higher small claims limits and fixed costs regimes that make it very challenging for lawyers to run such cases.

“Employers and public liability cases are also well down on their previous highs, but it’s in motor claims where - despite road traffic and vehicle numbers being pretty much back to their previous, pre-pandemic highs – it’s much harder to get your yourself repaired than it is your vehicle."

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Notes to editors: 

The latest CRU data table is below, for information on road usage please see here, for the Motor Insurance Taskforce final report see here and for the HM Treasury report on the savings from the whiplash reforms, see here.