Do you live in a compensation culture?
Many people in this country believe that we are in the grip of a compensation culture; a culture that invites people with trivial complaints to sue other people, businesses or public bodies for vast sums of money at apparently little or no risk to themselves. We only need to look at some daily newspapers to have this belief supposedly confirmed.
A task force was set up by the Government to look at the whole issue of compensation and the compensation culture to confirm whether indeed it does exist and if so how to tackle it. It wholeheartedly rejected the suggestion that the United Kingdom is in the grip of such a compensation culture. Much of the belief may be put down to media hype and the task force has found that personal injury claims, rather than being on the increase, are in fact on the decline.
Perhaps we think that we do live in a compensation culture because of jaw-dropping headlines that attract our attention. Unfortunately these headlines seldom record accurately the facts of the case and indeed often newspapers do not even report the outcome of allegedly heavyweight claims.
By looking at the newspapers we might be led to believe that the majority of claims are settled at vast sums, but in fact the majority of final awards are under £3,000 and only a very small proportion, less than 2%, are over £25,000.00.
Perhaps it would be as well to consider the benefits of the rise in personal injury litigation over the years. Had it not been for developments in the law in relation to the duty of care owed by one body to another, we might have seen more people with severe disabilities, such as amputees. It is arguable that because insurance companies have had to pay out substantial damages for injuries caused by dangerous machinery, health and safety at work regulations now make such injuries less commonplace than they once were.
Headlines can also encourage people to have unrealistic expectations as to the size of compensation they might recover in a claim for damages. Some highly publicised reports suggest claimants recover sizeable sums of money for what are reported as trivial injuries. Often the reports in newspapers leave out important facts that would explain why in those rare cases substantial compensation has been awarded.
Recent research by Warwick University School of Law has also contradicted claims that the compensation culture is spiralling out of control. Research shows that the number of claims going through the Courts has actually fallen rather than increased over recent years. This would appear to support statements by MPs and the Government that the compensation culture is largely a myth.
We should perhaps be circumspect about reports in the media. The Constitutional Affairs Select Committee has observed that alleged fears over health and safety issues have sometimes been used by organisations as an excuse to ban activities that they did not want to provide purely for financial reasons.
Many genuine injury victims have been discouraged from making claims and receiving the damages that they deserve because they have been made to feel that they are somehow doing something wrong. People who are injured as a result of someone else's negligence are entitled to compensation and they should not be made to feel uneasy about asserting their rights.
Romany Mark Bruce, Associate
back | home | contact us | legal stuff