Evidence Capture Before GTA Binding ADR

The operational effect of binding arbitration is that it moves your evidence deadline forward and makes the file, rather than the argument, the thing that decides the claim.

That is a systems question before it is a legal one, and it is worth separating the two.

What is changing, briefly

Phase 2 of the GTA ADR scheme is due to open in September 2026. Credit hire invoices under £10,000 that remain unresolved 61 days after presentation become eligible for a binding decision by a specialist who understands the GTA, rather than drifting out of the protocol towards the county court.

Three things about it matter for how a desk runs.

It is voluntary. Nothing forces a file in. Both sides have to agree. So at day 61 you are not being processed, you are being offered a route and having to decide.

The decision binds. No appeal route to fall back on.

The cost runs both ways. As the scheme has been described, where an insurer fails to make a reasonable offer in good time and the outcome upholds the hire company's figure, an uplift applies and the insurer pays the fee. Where the insurer made a fair offer in good time, the hire company declined it, and the outcome sides with the insurer, the settlement is reduced and the hire company pays the fee.

That last one is the genuinely new exposure. Late payment penalties have always run against the insurer. This is the first time a credit hire organisation carries a direct financial consequence for declining a reasonable offer and being wrong about it.

The full mechanics, the exclusions and the case for consenting or not are a separate discussion. What follows is the part that lands on the system.

Why day 55 rather than day 61

Because day 61 is the point at which a claim becomes eligible, not the point at which you start getting ready.

If your duration evidence has to be reconstructed at that stage, from a mailbox and a notes field, you are assembling it under time pressure with a decision already in motion, and you are assembling it from whatever happened to get written down at the time. That is a bad position and it is entirely avoidable, because everything you need was available while the hire was running.

The shift is from evidence as something you produce when challenged, to evidence as something the file accumulates as a matter of course.

What actually supports a hire period

A dated sequence, not a total.

"Hire ran 47 days" is a number. What decides a duration argument is the story of those 47 days, with dates and sources attached:

• When the vehicle went in, and who confirmed it.
• What the repairer said about capacity or parts, on what date, in what form.
• What each period of delay was attributed to, at the time rather than in hindsight.
• When a total loss decision was made, and when it was communicated.
• When the customer was told what, and what they were asked to do.
• Every offer received, when it arrived, and what the response was.

A specialist who knows credit hire will look for that sequence and will notice where it is thin, without the other side needing to point it out. That is the real difference from a district judge seeing credit hire twice a year, and it cuts both ways. A well-evidenced file should do better and faster. A file that has been getting by on the other side's inability to engage will do worse.

Most desks have most of this information. What they often do not have is it in one place, dated, and retrievable for a single claim without somebody spending an afternoon on it.

The offer trail is now a first-class record

This is the change most likely to be missed.

If declining an offer can cost you a reduction and the fee, then every offer and every decision to decline it needs a reason recorded against it at the time. Not a recollection three months later.

Practically, that means an offer is an event on the claim, with a date, a value, who it came from, what the response was, and why. If your system treats offers as correspondence rather than as structured events, you cannot report on them, cannot review a pattern of declines, and cannot show your reasoning when it matters.

The useful test is simple. Pick a claim where an offer was declined four months ago. How long does it take to establish what was offered, when, and on what basis it was turned down? If the answer is more than a couple of minutes, that is the gap.

The 80% problem is a capture problem

Verisk's data on the GTA pilot put it starkly: fewer than 2% of GTA cases end up in litigation, but more than 80% of claims settled inside the framework are still adjusted from the invoiced figure before they settle.

Read that as an operations statistic rather than a legal one. Four out of five claims that nobody is really fighting about still need somebody to go back and forth over them. That is not a dispute problem. It is a claim quality problem at submission, and it consumes a very large amount of handler time on claims that were never contentious.

The same picture shows up in litigation. Somewhere between half and 60% of credit hire litigation settles only once disclosure has happened, which is to say after both sides have spent money reaching the point where they could simply have exchanged the evidence.

Both numbers point the same way. The cheapest place to disclose is at submission. Improving what goes out first time is worth more than winning arguments later, and it is the only one of the two that reduces work rather than adding it.

What this asks of a claims system

Five things. None of them is exotic, and the gap is usually between having the information and being able to produce it.

Structured events, not free text. Repair milestones, offers, delays and customer contact as dated records with a source, rather than paragraphs in a notes field. Free text is where evidence goes to be forgotten.

Delay reasons from a fixed list. If every handler writes the reason in their own words, you cannot see a pattern across the book, and you cannot answer the question a specialist will ask about why this hire ran longer than a comparable one.

A retrievable timeline per claim. One click, in order, dated. This is the single most useful thing a system can do for an ADR-eligible file.

Eligibility visible on the file. Hire element under £10,000, past 60 days, no fraud allegation, not multi-party, not linked to injury litigation. That is a filter your system can run, and it tells you the size of your exposure to the scheme long before anyone offers you a route.

Reporting without an export. If answering "which of our open files are ADR-eligible and how good is the evidence on them" requires a spreadsheet build, you will not do it monthly, and it is a monthly question now.

We built KinClaims around that shape, and we have written before about getting credit hire off spreadsheets for the same reasons. But the point stands whatever you run on. A binding decision made on the file rewards operations that capture as they go and punishes ones that reconstruct.

What to do in the next fortnight

Four things, none of which need the final scheme rules.

1. Run the eligibility filter across your open book. Hire element under £10,000, past 60 days, no fraud allegation, not multi-party, no linked injury claim. See what the volume looks like. If it is a meaningful share of your aged debt, this affects your cashflow.

2. Take ten of those files and try to produce the duration timeline. Time yourself. That is your honest baseline.

3. Check whether you can find the offer history on a declined claim. If you cannot, fix that before anything else, because it is the new exposure.

4. Agree who decides on consent. Because the route is voluntary, somebody needs to own when you say yes, with criteria set in advance rather than decided by whoever opens the offer.

The short version

The scheme changes who decides and how quickly. What it really changes for an operator is that the file has to be able to speak for itself, on a timescale that does not allow for reconstruction.

Most of that is not a legal problem. It is whether the information you already have is captured in a form you can produce on demand. That is worth looking at this month rather than at the first award.