How much compensation will I get?
Nobody can answer this honestly at the outset, and any firm that gives you a figure on the first call is guessing. What can be explained is how the figure is built, and that is more useful than a number.
Compensation has two halves
Solatium compensates the injury itself: the pain, the suffering, and the loss of amenity, meaning the things you can no longer do. It is assessed from the medical evidence, guided by published brackets and by awards in comparable Scottish cases.
Patrimonial loss compensates everything financial: earnings lost so far and in the future, medical and rehabilitation costs, care provided by family members, travel, equipment and adaptations to a home or vehicle.
In serious cases the financial half dwarfs the injury half
A back injury that ends a manual worker’s career at forty is worth a great deal more than the same injury to someone who returns to a desk in six weeks, and almost the whole of that difference is future loss of earnings. Insurers’ early offers habitually reflect the injury and ignore the career.
Why online calculators mislead
Most compensation calculators are built on English data, and Scotland does not use the whiplash tariff at all. They also produce a solatium figure only, which in any significant case is a fraction of the claim. Treat them as an indication of the smallest component, not of the claim.
Childhood abuse claims have no time limit
Where the injury arises from abuse suffered as a child on or after 26th September 1964, the three year limitation period does not apply at all. Legislation passed in 2017 removed it. Many people in this position have been told, sometimes years ago, that they were too late. That is no longer the law.
What reduces an award
Contributory negligence reduces damages by your share of responsibility, so a claim worth twenty thousand pounds where you were a quarter to blame settles at fifteen thousand. Failing to mitigate, for instance by declining reasonable treatment or making no attempt to find suitable work, reduces it further. Pre-existing conditions are taken into account, though an employer or driver takes their victim as they find them.
Interest, benefits and repayments
Interest runs on past losses and on part of the solatium. Where state benefits have been paid because of the accident, the compensator must repay certain of them to the Compensation Recovery Unit, and in some circumstances those amounts are deducted from parts of the award. Your solicitor should explain the effect on the net figure before you accept anything.
What comes out of it
If your solicitor charges a success fee, it comes out of your damages and it is capped by regulations at twenty per cent of the first hundred thousand pounds, ten per cent of the next four hundred thousand and two and a half per cent above that, applied in bands and inclusive of VAT. If your solicitor recovers expenses from the other side and charges no success fee, you keep the whole award. Ask which applies before you sign.
Do not settle early
Settle once
A settlement is final. If the injury turns out worse than expected, you cannot go back. The medical position must be reasonably settled, or the future properly provided for, before a figure means anything. Insurers make early offers because they know this and you may not.
A note on this page
This is general information about how the law works in Scotland. It is not advice about your situation and it cannot be, because we do not know your circumstances. Nothing here should be relied on as a substitute for speaking to a solicitor about your own case.
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