I won £4,000 in court after being hit by a car on my bike- all the driver had to do was say sorry

Harry Gray, 29, was hit from behind by a driver in Bolton, Lancs., and was left unable to move properly. The accident happened as he went out for a post-Christmas bike ride on December 28, 2022.

The experienced rider, who owns his own fashion company, said: “I set off from the traffic light and I was at the front of the queue. As I got through the junction, the road narrowed and this guy hit me from behind.

“I landed pretty badly on my back. The driver was shocked at what had happened, but he displayed that through his anger. He was basically shouting at me, saying it was my fault and that I was in the way.”

The pair exchanged details, and Harry was given a lift home in the back of a police van, alongside his damaged £900 road bike and broken equipment. Police did not criminally prosecute the driver, with Harry saying they 'weren't bothered' and had said it was for insurers to deal with.

Harry said: “It’s good to know that there’s consequences for his actions, even if I would have preferred the police to have actually done something, because they weren’t even interested. They attended the scene, but they weren’t bothered at all, they said ‘oh it’s for the insurers to deal with’. I was like ‘great, I’m just an insurance claim on this, my body is just an insurance claim, it doesn’t matter that I was run over.’”

Harry decided to pursue the case further a friend suggested he contact no-win no-fee solicitors to make a claim. He had doubted the claim would work as he had no video or photo evidence of the crash.

However, the advice paid dividends, and Harry, from Salford, has now won £4,252.96 in compensation, which he plans to spend on the cycling ‘trip of a lifetime’.

Harry said: “Once the claim process started I didn’t even need to speak to the driver ever again, because it was all done through the solicitor and the driver’s insurance. The claim took a while to gather evidence, because I had to gather evidence on the time I took off work, and the amount of time my partner had to help me.

“I couldn’t move properly for a couple of weeks as I actually bruised my coccyx, so I couldn’t really do anything for two weeks. All that got fed through email to the solicitor, they built a case up, took the case to the insurance company, and the insurance company of the driver admitted fault.”

After a dispute over the amount of compensation to be paid, the case was eventually taken to court, and judged in Harry’s favour. The active travel campaigner said the whole ordeal could have been entirely avoided, had the driver simply apologised to him on the roadside.

He added: “I’m very malleable to other people’s behaviour, if someone is aggressive to me I’m defensive back. If someone does something bad to me, even if it’s something minor to me like on the road, where someone accidentally cuts you up, if I catch them up and they go ‘oh, I’m really sorry,’ I’ll go ‘no worries, it’s fine’.

“Really, all I want from people is for them to understand what they’ve done is wrong and own up to the mistake. We all make mistakes on the road, and that’s fine. Maybe the design of the road needs to be better to eliminate a lot of people’s mistakes, but with the current road layouts there’s always going to be the odd time where mistakes happen.

“I just think people need to have a bit more humility and own up to their mistakes, rather than being really defensive, because I didn’t even go up to him or say anything, I was vulnerable on the road, in pain. He saw me in the middle of the road and was straight away saying ‘you’re at fault, you’re at fault.’

“If he had been nice to me, and said sorry and offered me a drink or lift home or whatever, it would have been a lot more difficult to put a claim in, because I would have felt like he was a good person, and I don’t want to make a good person suffer with their life.”

After half a year of anxiety following the crash, Harry is now back on the road.

He said: “I had a lot of fear, if I heard an engine revving behind me I would get really scared it was going to happen again, so I was constantly turning around looking for cars all the time. It’s kind of dissipated now, a lot of other stuff has happened so it’s gone into the back of my mind.”

Andrew Littlemore, head of cycling accidents at JMW Solicitors, said: “Unfortunately, being involved in a collision as a cyclist can have ramifications as it did for Harry. JMW understand the needs of cyclists as vulnerable road users and we are pleased that our experienced and specialist cycling team at JMW were able to work with Harry to help him achieve compensation, despite having to fight all the way on this case and take it to court. 

“We were able to achieve the right outcome for Harry after his accident and help him get back out cycling again.”

Greater Manchester Police was contacted for comment.