Portal company warns over April deadline

Claims Portal, the company behind the RTA portal, has warned that “significant amendments” to the draft civil procedure rules next year would give it “insufficient time” to implement the government’s plans to expand the portal on 1 April 2013.

The MoJ has announced an increase in the upper limit for portal RTA claims from £10,000 to £25,000 from April next year and an expansion to include employers’ and public liability claims up to that amount.

Claims Portal also said in a board statement that, in any event, A2A (application to application) access to the portal will not available by April, causing “additional effort and cost” to firms handling employer’s and public liability claims.

A spokeswoman for Claims Portal, formerly RTA Portal Co, said the civil procedure rules committee failed to finalise the rules relating to the portal at its meeting on 7 December. She said they were now unlikely to be finalised before 8 February 2013.

“In the event that the final versions are not significantly different from the drafts, the extended portal will still be on course to be delivered by 1 April 2013, although this may be on the basis that some manual ‘workarounds’ will have to be used until the first software amendment is implemented, which is likely to be available in September 2013.”

The spokeswoman went on to explain that the software currently being built for 1 April 2013 was designed to enable access to the RTA area of the extended portal by both web users and A2A users.

“Due to time constraints, initially only web-based access will be available for the employer’s and public liability area of the extended portal,” she said.

She said that A2A access, which enables larger firms to customise their interface to the portal, would be available until the first ‘software amendment’ was made, which was planned for September.

The spokeswoman added that Claims Portal had regular meetings with the MoJ to discuss developments, the last on Wednesday this week.