AFTER winning the first round when the court ruled that the Road Accident Fund (RAF) could lodge claims without technical hurdles in its way, papers have been lodged to permanently set aside these restrictive measures.
Seven claimants, with Adams & Adams lawyer JP Rudd at the helm, scored a victory last week for the millions of road accident victims across the country when the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria ordered the RAF not to refuse any new claims from being lodged.
Judge Norman Davis issued this order, pending a review application by Rudd to permanently put an end to a directive and subsequent notice published in the Government Gazette by the RAF.
In these notices, the RAF has set out a number of requirements which claimants had to adhere to before they could lodge a claim. These included a host of reports - accident and medical reports - which had to be submitted with the claim before the RAF was prepared to accept the claim.
This resulted in claims officials refusing a host of claims across the country. In many of these cases, the claims were due to lapse as they were on the brink of the three-year period in which claims can be submitted.
In some of these cases, the court had to step in on an individual and urgent basis to force the fund to accept the claims before they lapsed.
Although the court gave the go-ahead for the lodging of new claims, this is an interim measure until the entire issue is reviewed by the court.
While the RAF persisted over the past months that the directive was legally issued and that the more recent public notices were legal, its chief executive, Collins Letsoalo, last week conceded in his affidavit before Judge Davis that the directive had to be withdrawn “for want of procedural fairness”.
Rudd had maintained from the start that the fund’s management was not entitled to unilaterally issue directives as the RAF Act did not make provision for this. He said the RAF was simply not entitled to add additional hurdles that constituted an unconstitutional bar to a claimant’s right to lodge a claim.
He said the public was prejudiced as they were not allowed an input into these additional requirements. Rudd said the RAF Act was clear on how claimants must submit their claims, and only the transport minister could alter these conditions.
He asked that the court overturn the directive issued in March this year, and the subsequent notice in the Government Gazette.
Letsoalo admitted to the court last week that the directive and subsequent notice had to be withdrawn due to procedural unfairness. He said while the fund agreed that the notices should be withdrawn at this stage, this was not the end of the matter.
He said the RAF would embark on a public education campaign to explain the rationale behind the fact that they wanted claims to be completed in full before they could be accepted by the entity.
According to Letsoalo, it was part of the RAF’s new strategy to streamline the settlement and payment of claims. He explained that the RAF had many claims which could not be concluded as documents such as full medical and accident reports were outstanding.
The RAF, meanwhile, must still file its papers in the review application.
Pretoria News