Hit and run victim from Bognor Regis backs campaign to protect law on compensation for victims

Rusty Brown, from Bognor Regis, suffered life changing injuries in 2017 when a Jaguar driver lost control of his vehicle and smashed into his car on the A259 in West Sussex.

Rusty, now 51-years-old, had to have his leg amputated after the head-on crash and has started working with the not-for-profit APIL as part of the Rebuilding Shattered Lives campaign – which safeguards the interests and rights of victims of traumatic accidents – and has spoken out about his experiences.

In a short film shot for the campaign, he describes how an NHS prosthetic simply didn’t work for him: ““I couldn’t walk further than a couple of minutes. The pain was excruciating. The fit was terrible,” he said. “I was getting despondent. I was getting upset.”

He goes on to explain that the other driver’s insurance company had originally claimed they were not responsible for paying compensation, making the toughest year of Rusty’s life even harder: “For the first year it made things very, very difficult. There was then the danger that actually, I wasn’t going to get any compensation.”

Fortunately, Rusty secured an interim payment which helped him until his legal compensation claim saw him paid out in full. The payment proved vital, allowing him to secure a more comfortable prosthetic leg, move out of his narrow, inaccessible terraced house and seek private treatment, in the three years it took for the full payment to arrive.

Today, Rusty has returned to his active lifestyle, which includes walking holidays with his partner Jacqui. Four years after his crash, in 2021, he climbed Ben Nevis.

Kim Harrison, president of APIL, said: “If there’s one thing we want people to take away from Rusty’s Story, it is that compensation is not a windfall. The money cannot undo what happened but it is crucial to helping injured people like Rusty get their lives as close as possible to how they were before the negligence. The law on injury claims should be valued and protected, which is what the Rebuilding Shattered Lives campaign is all about. The needs of injured victims must be at the heart of any debate about the law on personal injury.”