70,526 injury claims are waiting for a medical report. A portal alone does not move them.

At the end of June 2026, 70,526 claims in the Official Injury Claim portal were dormant at the status 'pending medical'. On average they had been there for 595 days [1]. That is not a backlog of complex cases. These are road traffic injury claims worth less than £5,000, in a service that was designed to make small claims simple.

The figure deserves attention, because it shows where a claim really stops.

What the OIC publishes

The OIC service was developed by MIB for the Ministry of Justice and has run since the whiplash reforms of 31 May 2021 [1]. It receives around 20,000 claims a month. In April to June 2026, 56,812 claims came in, and the average time from claim submission to settlement was 367 days [1].

The OIC is open about the problem. It tracks claims through their stages: liability, obtaining and sharing a medical report, offers, settlement. And it writes that dormancy happens when claims stall, "with a lack of input or updates to the system leaving the claim in the same status" [1]. In its own words, dormancy is "playing an increasing role as a barrier to claims progressing" [1].

The numbers by status make that concrete [1]:

• 'Pending medical': 49,551 claims that are moving, at 72 days on average, and 70,526 that are dormant, at 595 days.
• 'Pending liability rejected': 15,993 moving, and 32,697 dormant at 586 days.

Claims that stay dormant close once they reach three years and three months after the accident "where no limitation has been issued" [1]. The OIC has written to the professional users with the largest numbers of dormant claims and asks users to do their own housekeeping [1].

A portal is not yet a file

This is the interesting part. The OIC is a structured, digital service. Users reach it through a web interface or an API [1]. Claims come in on forms, not as loose emails. And still the largest pool of stalled claims waits for one document.

The reason is simple. A medical report for these claims is a step in the chain, outside the insurer. The Civil Liability Act 2018 bans seeking or offering to settle a whiplash claim without medical evidence [1]. The first report comes from an accredited expert, selected through MedCo [2]. So the claim depends on a sequence of parties: claimant or representative, the medical reporting route, the expert, back into the portal, then the compensator. A status field records where the claim is. It does not say who has to act, by when, or what happens if nobody does.

That is the difference between a portal and a file. A file holds the status, the task, the owner and the deadline in one place, for everyone involved. When a medical report has not arrived after a set period, the file does not wait. It raises the task, reminds the party who owns it, and escalates if nothing happens. What the system knows, nobody has to watch.

Why AI does not solve this on its own

It is tempting to put AI on this. An agent that reads the portal, finds the dormant claims and writes chasers. It would produce a lot of activity. It would not change much. The chaser lands in an inbox, next to all the others. The report still has to be arranged by someone, somewhere else in the chain.

AI works on a file that is right. On a file where the medical step is a task with an owner, the agent can do real work: classify and summarise the report the moment it lands, check it against the claim, prepare the tariff offer for the handler. On a file that consists of a status and a mailbox, the agent inherits the mailbox. Then you have a faster process from 2005.

The human does the contact

There is a second figure in the same publication. In April to June 2026 the OIC support centre took 4,592 calls from unrepresented claimants, with progress updates and medical questions among the most common reasons [1]. People want to know where their claim stands and what comes next. That is a fair question, and the file should answer it before they need to call.

When it does, the conversation that remains is the one that matters. Not 'has my report arrived', but 'my neck still hurts, what now'. That conversation is for a person who has the file open. The agents do the paperwork. The people do the contact.

Where to start

Three questions for your own team. How many of your small injury claims are waiting for a medical report, and for how long? For each of them, do you know who owns the next step? And does the claimant see the same answer as your handler?

If the answer to the second question is no, that is your first project. AI comes after.

We set out the full line of thought for the UK in our vision Agentic AI in personal injury.

Sources

[1] Official Injury Claim (MIB on behalf of the Ministry of Justice), Claims data, for the period 1 April to 30 June 2026, July 2026: introduction, headline data, settlements, dormancy (section 11) and the Portal Support Centre (section 12).

[2] Ministry of Justice, consultation on the provision of medical reports in road traffic accident related personal injury claims; and Practice Direction 35, on the first report from an accredited expert selected through the MedCo portal.