Minicab passenger accident claim (non-fault other driver)

You are not the policyholder, and your own insurance is not involved

The first thing to understand is the architecture of the claim. You were a fare-paying passenger in a vehicle insured by someone else on a hire-and-reward policy you have never signed. You may also hold your own personal motor policy for a vehicle you were not driving that day. Neither policy is engaged by the collision. The minicab driver's policy is unaffected on a non-fault file because the minicab driver did not cause the loss. Your personal policy is unaffected because you were not driving anything. There is therefore no premium loading on you, no no-claims hit, no proposal-form disclosure trigger and no excess to pay.

The claim is brought by you, as the injured third party, against the at-fault driver and their insurer. Every UK driver must carry a motor policy that satisfies section 143 of the Road Traffic Act 1988. That policy must cover their liability to third parties - including passengers in vehicles they collide with. Where the at-fault driver is insolvent, has been dissolved or has otherwise become impossible to sue directly, the Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act 2010 gives you the right to step into the insured's shoes and proceed directly against the insurer.

The 2010 Act was a procedural reform of huge practical importance: under the old 1930 regime an injured third party had to obtain a judgment against the insured first, and only then could they enforce against the insurer. The 2010 Act collapses the two stages into one. You can join the insurer as a co-defendant from the outset. The insurer can raise the coverage defences that would have been available against the insured, and can set off premiums owing - but the substantive right to sue is yours, not the insolvent insured's. For a minicab passenger this matters most when the at-fault driver was a foreign-domiciled defendant, a sole trader who has wound up, or any party who has gone quiet between the collision and the claim.

A second piece of architecture: the minicab driver themselves is your fellow victim, not your defendant. Where the collision was caused by the other car, the minicab driver and the passenger have aligned interests - both want the at-fault driver's insurer to pay. The minicab driver's own evidence (dashcam, contemporaneous statement, the operator's booking record) is often the best evidence in your file. CityGrip's practice is to ask the passenger's permission to liaise with the driver's file handler so that the two evidence packs are aligned and no avoidable contradictions creep into the witness statements.

Highway Code Rule H1 - the hierarchy of road users and the rear-seat passenger

Rule H1 of The Highway Code establishes a hierarchy of road users. The rule was rewritten in January 2022 as part of a broader rebalancing in favour of vulnerable road users and reads, in essence, that those road users who can do the greatest harm have the greatest responsibility to reduce the danger they pose to others. The hierarchy descends from heavy goods vehicles at the top - most able to harm, highest responsibility - through cars and vans, motorcycles, cyclists, horse riders and pedestrians at the bottom. Pedestrians are the most vulnerable and carry the lowest responsibility for managing shared road danger.

A minicab passenger sits in an interesting position on this hierarchy. The passenger is inside a car, so on a first reading they share the car driver's position. But the passenger does not control any aspect of the journey - not the speed, not the lookout, not the lane discipline, not the choice to brake. The passenger is strapped into a rear seat that absorbs the collision passively. In practice, courts treat the passenger as a low-control, high-vulnerability user inside the protective shell of the vehicle, and the duty of care that other drivers owe to that passenger is correspondingly high. The duty owed by the at-fault driver to a passenger in a vehicle they have collided with is not diluted because the passenger is technically “inside a car”.

What this means evidentially is that on disputed-liability files - particularly where the at-fault driver tries to apportion blame to the minicab driver or to argue that the passenger somehow contributed - the H1 hierarchy is one of the inferential anchors a court will draw on. The court asks: who could have prevented the harm? The passenger could not. The at-fault driver, who controlled the colliding vehicle, could. The hierarchy does not decide cases on its own, but it tilts the inferences drawn from ambiguous facts. CityGrip notes the H1 framing in every passenger-file letter to the at-fault insurer, because it is the structural backdrop against which contributory-negligence arguments are pressed and (usually) defeated.

A small but important note on seat belts: a passenger who was not wearing a seat belt may face a contributory-negligence deduction, typically 15 per cent where the seat belt would have prevented the injuries and 25 per cent where it would have reduced their severity, following the long-established gloss in Froom v Butcher [1976] QB 286. The vast majority of minicab passengers do wear belts, but if you were unbelted at the moment of impact the insurer's engineers will look for seat-belt marks on the body and on the belt itself.

The Official Injury Claim portal, the £5,000 PSLA ceiling and the Civil Liability Act 2018

Since 31 May 2021 the standard route for low-value road traffic accident personal injury claims in England and Wales has been the Official Injury Claim portal at officialinjuryclaim.org.uk. The portal was created by the Ministry of Justice as part of the implementation of the Civil Liability Act 2018, which was Parliament's response to the perceived high cost of low-value RTA injury claims under the predecessor MOJ portal regime. Two reforms went hand in hand: a statutory whiplash tariff fixed by regulation, and an increase in the small-claims-track injury limit from £1,000 PSLA to £5,000 PSLA for road traffic claims.

If your injury element - pain, suffering and loss of amenity - is worth £5,000 or less, the OIC portal is the route. The portal is designed to be used by claimants without a solicitor, although you may instruct one if you choose. You register on the portal, enter the at-fault driver's details, upload a medical report from an accredited MedCo expert, and the portal manages the timeline through to offer and acceptance. The compensator (the at-fault driver's insurer) responds through the same portal. Property damage (your phone, your laptop, your clothes) runs as a parallel head of loss alongside the PSLA tariff, and so does loss of earnings.

If the injury value sits above £5,000 PSLA the claim leaves the OIC portal and runs through the ordinary pre-action protocol for personal injury claims, with the claimant's legal costs recoverable from the at-fault insurer under the fast- track or multi-track costs rules. A passenger does not have to make the portal-versus-protocol call in isolation - CityGrip's practice is to refer the file to an SRA-regulated panel solicitor on disclosed referral terms wherever the injury element is non-trivial. For mild whiplash that has fully resolved at three months, the portal is usually the right route. For ongoing pain at three months, an immediate medical review is sensible because the eventual tariff band depends on duration, and the duration is a moving target until the injury actually resolves.

One important quirk: the OIC portal excludes “vulnerable road users” from its small-claims-track scope, retaining the old £1,000 PSLA limit for them. Vulnerable road users in this context are cyclists, motorcyclists, pillion and sidecar passengers, pedestrians, horse riders and mobility-scooter users. A minicab passenger is not a VRU under this definition because they are inside a car. The OIC portal therefore is the route for passengers, not the £1,000 small-claims track. This is one of the points where the OIC scheme's drafting deserves close attention - get it wrong and you under-pursue the claim.

The whiplash tariff under SI 2025/615 - accidents on or after 31 May 2025

For an accident on or after 31 May 2025 the whiplash tariff is set by The Whiplash Injury (Amendment) Regulations 2025 (SI 2025/615), which amend the Whiplash Injury Regulations 2021 (SI 2021/642). The 2021 Regulations were the original implementing regulations under section 3 of the Civil Liability Act 2018 and brought in fixed tariff amounts for RTA-related whiplash injuries of up to 24 months' duration. The 2025 amendment uplifts those amounts by approximately 15 per cent to account for cumulative inflation since 2021 and to provide a small buffer to the next statutory review in 2027.

There are two columns. The first is the tariff for whiplash alone (Regulation 2(1)(a) of the 2021 Regulations as amended). The second is the tariff where minor psychological injury was also suffered on the same occasion (Regulation 2(1)(b)). The injury duration is measured to resolution - when the symptoms stop, not when you stop attending physiotherapy. The medical report from the MedCo expert sets the duration. The tariff figures for accidents on or after 31 May 2025 are:

Above 24 months the tariff no longer applies. A whiplash injury that has not resolved by 24 months is valued conventionally, with reference to the Judicial College Guidelines for the Assessment of General Damages in Personal Injury Cases - the figure can run substantially higher and the OIC portal is the wrong forum. Equally, a passenger with non-whiplash injuries (fracture, head injury, dental damage, scarring, psychiatric injury beyond the “minor psych” uplift) is valued conventionally for those heads. The tariff is a floor and a cap for whiplash, not the whole valuation.

The court has a residual power under section 5 of the Civil Liability Act 2018 to uplift the tariff by up to 20 per cent in exceptional circumstances - the so-called “exceptional circumstances” uplift. In practice it is rarely deployed and the at-fault insurer almost always settles within tariff. Pursuing the exceptional uplift is a tactical question for the solicitor and is not normally worth the risk on a low-value file. Our standalone whiplash compensation guide sets out the same duration-banded figures in a non-PHV context for any passenger or driver claimant. Where you were a passenger in a car that was not a licensed PHV - a friend's car, a parent's car, a private rideshare - our passenger accident claim page covers the parallel route under the Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act 2010. Panel solicitors handle most non-PHV passenger files on a no win, no fee CFA so there is no upfront cost to the passenger.

Taxi fare reimbursement, onward transport and the Liesbosch principle

The fare you paid for the minicab journey that was disrupted by the collision is a consequential loss flowing directly from the at-fault driver's negligence and is recoverable from the at-fault insurer. So is the cost of any onward transport you reasonably had to arrange to complete the journey - a second minicab, a train fare, a bus fare, a hire-car day rate while you waited for a hospital discharge. So are later transport costs for medical appointments arising from the injury: trips to the GP, to the MedCo medical expert, to physiotherapy, to A&E follow-ups.

The conceptual anchor for this head of loss is the rule in Liesbosch Dredger (Owners of) v Owners of SS Edison [1933] AC 449. The House of Lords held that a claimant's want of means was not a factor in assessing damages - the measure was the market cost of the loss, not the more expensive substitute the claimant was forced to obtain because they could not afford the cheaper alternative. For seventy years the Liesbosch rule was applied strictly. It was then softened, in negligence, by Lagden v O’Connor [2003] UKHL 64, which held that where the claimant was impecunious - could not afford the basic substitute - the wrongdoer must pay the more expensive credit-hire rate the claimant was forced to take instead.

For a minicab passenger the practical consequence is that the at-fault insurer cannot say “a bus would have been cheaper” if the bus was not actually a feasible option for an injured claimant carrying shopping at 11pm in the rain from a part of the city with no bus link to where you live. The fare is a reasonable consequential loss, evidenced by the booking confirmation from the app or the operator's email, the payment record on your bank statement and the fare receipt where one was issued. Keep all three. Where the at-fault insurer queries the fare, the response is documentary: this was the cost incurred, this is the booking record, this is the receipt.

One further category often missed: parking charges, congestion-zone charges, ULEZ charges and tolls that you reasonably incurred as part of attending medical treatment after the collision are recoverable on the same basis. Receipts, dates and a one-line note on the purpose of each trip are enough. Mileage on your own vehicle (where you have one) is recoverable at HMRC's approved mileage rate of 45p per mile for the first 10,000 miles, by industry practice if not statute.

When the at-fault driver was uninsured - the MIB route under the 2015 Agreement

Some at-fault drivers are uninsured. They drove without a valid policy, drove on a policy that had lapsed, drove on a policy that did not cover the use being made of the vehicle, or were not entitled to drive at all. The criminal offence of uninsured driving under section 143(2) of the Road Traffic Act 1988 carries six-to-eight penalty points and an unlimited fine. The civil position for the injured passenger is that the at-fault driver has no insurer behind them, and a direct judgment against the driver may be impossible to enforce.

For these cases the United Kingdom maintains a backstop. The Motor Insurers' Bureau is a private company funded by a levy on every UK motor insurer, and it operates a set of agreements with the Secretary of State for Transport under which it compensates victims of uninsured and untraced drivers. The current uninsured agreement is the MIB Uninsured Drivers' Agreement 2015 - our full procedural walk-through is on the MIB uninsured driver claim page. It applies to accidents on or after 1 August 2015. Under that agreement the MIB stands behind any unsatisfied judgment for personal injury without monetary limit and for property damage subject to a £1,000,000 property damage cap and a small property-damage excess.

The MIB process has tight procedural conditions. Notice of the claim must be given to the MIB in writing as soon as reasonably practicable and in any event before proceedings are issued. Where proceedings are commenced, the MIB must be named as a co-defendant from the outset (failure to join is a common reason for MIB to refuse cover). The claimant must give a statement to the police where they have not already done so. The MIB has its own investigation regime and reserves conservatively. Expect a longer timeline than an ordinary insurer claim - eighteen to thirty months on a contested file is normal. Interim payments are available on serious-injury files where the impact on the claimant's finances is severe.

A separate parallel agreement, the Untraced Drivers' Agreement, covers hit-and-run cases - where the at-fault driver cannot be identified at all - and is set out in detail on our MIB untraced driver claim page. The Untraced Agreement's procedural requirements are similar but include an absolute requirement to report the collision to the police. Where the police are involved and a STATS19 record exists, the Untraced route is open. A minicab passenger in a hit-and-run case should treat the police report as a procedural pre-condition, not a discretionary step. The same three-year limitation period applies whichever MIB route is engaged.

Children as passengers - the limitation clock, litigation friends and court approval

A child in a minicab - strapped into a booster seat or an ISOFIX child seat in the rear - has the same substantive right to compensation as an adult passenger but cannot enforce it personally. The Civil Procedure Rules, at Part 21, require any claim by a child (a person under the age of 18) to be conducted by a litigation friend on the child's behalf. The litigation friend is usually a parent or legal guardian, but can be any adult with capacity who is willing to act, who has no conflict of interest with the child and who undertakes to pay any costs ordered against the child. The litigation friend signs documents, instructs the solicitor and gives evidence as needed.

The limitation period for a child's personal-injury claim does not start running until the child turns 18. This is the rule under section 28 of the Limitation Act 1980, the “extension of limitation period in case of disability” provision, which the Act's section 38 defines to include minority. The child therefore has until their 21st birthday to bring the claim - the three-year clock under section 11 starts on their 18th birthday. In practice this means a child injured in a minicab collision at age six has fifteen years to start proceedings. Most claims are pursued long before then, because evidence is freshest in the first six months and the medical position can be assessed once the child has reached substantial physical maturity.

Any settlement of a child's claim must be approved by the court under CPR 21.10. This applies even where the at-fault insurer has agreed the figure with the litigation friend - court approval is a procedural protection for the child, not a last-resort tribunal. The court reviews the proposed settlement, the medical evidence and counsel's opinion on the merits, and either approves or rejects it. Approved settlements are usually paid into the Court Funds Office and held until the child turns 18 (or earlier if there is a specific medical need that the fund must meet in the meantime, in which case interim payments out of the fund are authorised by the court).

A practical note on child seats and proper restraint: where a child was secured in the correct child seat for their height and weight under the UK Construction and Use Regulations, no contributory-negligence argument is available to the at-fault insurer. Where the child was unrestrained or in an unsuitable seat - for example a forward-facing seat for a child below the relevant height - the insurer may run a Froom v Butcher-style contributory-negligence argument. The minicab driver carries a separate duty under TfL and council licence conditions to refuse the journey if a suitable child seat is not available, but the responsibility for providing the seat itself usually sits with the parent.

Continue inside the UK PHV passenger claim cluster

This page sits inside the wider UK minicab / PHV accident-claims hub. The sibling pages below pick up the platform-specific question (Uber, Bolt) and the converse position where the minicab driver themselves caused the collision. The adjacent topics cover the procedural infrastructure - injury referral, the MIB route, the hit-and-run regime and the “who pays what” map across the non-fault file.

• Minicab accident claims (hub)
• Minicab passenger - fault-driver claim
• Uber accident claims
• Bolt accident claims

Adjacent topics on the wider site

• Injury claim referral
• Uninsured driver accident support
• Hit-and-run accident support
• Who pays what

Six-step passenger claim journey

1. Step 1

   Make the scene safe, check yourself and call 999 if needed

   Stay in the minicab if it is safer to do so. If you need to leave the vehicle, exit on the kerb side away from moving traffic. Call 999 if anyone is injured, if the road is blocked, if there is a fire or fuel leak, or if any driver tries to leave without exchanging details. Note the time, the weather and the road conditions. Do not move the minicab unless directed by police or to clear an obstruction.

2. Step 2

   Capture the minicab booking evidence and the other driver's details

   Photograph the back of the minicab to capture the PHV plate number. Note the driver badge ID displayed inside the cabin, the operator name (Uber, Bolt, Addison Lee, FreeNow, local firm) and your booking reference from the app. Take the other driver's name, address, vehicle registration, insurer and policy number under Road Traffic Act 1988 section 170. Photograph every vehicle in its resting position, the damage, the road markings and any signage before vehicles are moved.

3. Step 3

   See a doctor or attend A&E within 48 hours

   Even if you feel only stiff or shaken, see a GP, walk-in centre, urgent treatment centre or A&E within 48 hours. A contemporaneous medical record is the single most valuable piece of evidence for a personal injury claim - it dates the symptoms to the collision and triggers the medical-record trail that the at-fault insurer will request later. Tell the clinician the date, time and mechanism of injury (rear-end shunt, side impact, etc.). Keep all discharge paperwork.

4. Step 4

   Open the claim through the OIC portal or instruct a panel solicitor

   For a low-value injury (£5,000 or less in pain, suffering and loss of amenity) the route is the Official Injury Claim portal at officialinjuryclaim.org.uk. You can use it directly. For higher-value injuries, mixed-injury complexity, child passengers or any case with a serious or potentially permanent injury, instruct an SRA-regulated solicitor. CityGrip refers passenger personal injury work to a panel solicitor on disclosed referral terms - you are told who the firm is, what the referral arrangement is and what (if anything) is deducted from any compensation.

5. Step 5

   Notify the at-fault insurer and quantify your losses

   Write to the at-fault driver's insurer (or have your solicitor do so) within seven to ten days. Itemise the heads of loss: the tariff whiplash sum under SI 2025/615 (band-dependent), loss of earnings (net), the disrupted minicab fare, any onward transport, damaged personal items at like-for-like replacement cost, and any medical or treatment costs. Provide payslips or SA302s, fare receipts, photographs of damaged property and original purchase receipts. The insurer must acknowledge the claim within statutory timeframes under the pre-action protocol.

6. Step 6

   Settle or, if liability is disputed, escalate to the MIB or to issue proceedings

   Most files settle within four to nine months on the papers. If the at-fault driver was uninsured, escalate to the Motor Insurers' Bureau under the Uninsured Drivers' Agreement 2015. If untraced (hit-and-run), use the Untraced Drivers' Agreement. If the at-fault insurer disputes liability and refuses to engage, issue proceedings inside the three-year limitation period under Limitation Act 1980 section 11. A child passenger's clock does not start until their eighteenth birthday under section 28.