Important compensation recovery information for injured party representatives

Your responsibilities

The compensator should give us your details when notifying us of the compensation claim.

When you submit the claim to the compensator you must provide your client’s full name, address, date of birth and National Insurance Number. You should also provide as much detail as possible about your client’s injury/disease, any hospital treatment your client received and any previous names your client was known by.

You must provide relevant information about your client’s claim to us if we ask for it.

As the representative of the injured person, you will receive a copy of certificates issued by Compensation Recovery Unit NI(CRU NI). If you are aware of a claim for compensation and you have not received a copy of the certificates, you should notify CRU NI to have your details added to the claim or you to register the claim with us

If you do not agree with the contents of a certificate we have issued and want us to carry out a review, you must explain fully why you disagree and provide evidence to demonstrate your position.

If you want us to review a Certificate of Health Services Charges to take account of contributory negligence you must provide the required evidence. You can use the Contributory Negligence Template to do this. The template must be fully completed and signed by a representative for both the compensator and the injured person.

Your client may appeal against a Certificate of recoverable benefits but only if their compensation payment has been reduced to take account of benefit recovery.

A Certificate of health services charges has no impact on your client’s claim and you may not ask for a review of, or appeal of, a health services Certificate.

Our responsibilities

A Certificate specifies the total amount of recoverable benefits and or lump sum payments.

We will send you a copy of a Certificate when we send one to the compensator. You cannot ask for a Certificate but, if you want to know the amount of recoverable benefits your client has received you can ask us for a statement of benefits.

We will action any review requests as soon as possible after all relevant information has been provided.

We will answer any enquiries you make as soon as possible. If you have a query about your client’s case, please contact us on 0800 587 2980.

The Law

We operate primarily under the following legislation:

• The Social Security (Recovery of Benefits) (Northern Ireland) Order 1997
• The Health and Personal Social Services Act (NI) 2001 (Part 2)
• The Recovery of Health Services Charges (NI) Order 2006

All the relevant legislation can be found on The National Archives website Northern Ireland Legislation.

If you need advice or assistance on any matters relating to compensation recovery, please contact Compensation Recovery Unit Northern Ireland.