Angered by politicians' tunnel vision on the so-called compensation culture, Colin Ettinger says the focal point should be improving safety

At last month's Gazette question time event (see [2005] Gazette, 1 April, 1, and 7 April, 14) I put this question to the panel: Do panel members believe that talking up the 'compensation culture' is a vote winner, despite advice from the Better Regulation Task Force that the compensation culture is in fact a myth?



The answers from the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, Lord Falconer and the Conservative Shadow Attorney-General Dominic Grieve MP were disappointing. It is clear that the so-called compensation culture is a headline-grabbing issue and the two main parties will milk it for all it is worth. The Lord Chancellor actually said that while the number of claims has gone down, he still believed the claims process was having an adverse effect on certain activities in society.


Mr Grieve expressed concern about rising insurance premiums and the burden they are imposing on business, suggesting this is being fuelled by a compensation culture. He said his party is shortly to announce some plans to deal with it. The reality is that insurance premiums are not going up as a result of increasing claims, because, quite simply, the number of claims has gone down.


I found the lack of focus on safety - the fact that we will have fewer claims if safety improves - extremely disappointing. Yet the focus is on compensation culture, not safety culture.


Perhaps this is one reason why the safety record in this country is nothing to write home about. In a debate in the House of Lords in December 2003, Lord Faulkner of Worcester said: 'The number of people killed or injured on our roads each year - to say nothing of the lives of friends and relatives wrecked as a consequence - is a national disgrace, particularly because virtually every accident is avoidable.'


The latest statistics from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) examine what are called 'health and safety failures' at work in the past year. The figures show 235 dead, 30,000-plus seriously injured, and in excess of two million people believed to be suffering from work-related ill health.


The cost in terms of human suffering is unimaginable and the cost to the economy is a fortune, yet there was no mention of health and safety from the leading parties. The day before the Gazette event, the Lord Chancellor gave a speech at a HSE conference. He dealt again with the compensation culture, and the fear of litigation it had engendered. He specifically mentioned teachers and the fact that if teachers follow recognised safety procedures and guidance, they have nothing to fear from the law. Again, the emphasis was on protecting those from the wrong end of the claim rather than those who are actually injured in the first place.


Indeed, what the government did not mention is what it is going to do about last year's survey by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents that revealed 95% of new teachers have not undergone risk assessment training, and a further 74% had received no health and safety training as part of their induction to a school.


It is all very well for the parties to bleat on about the destructive effects of the so-called compensation culture and about the fears arising from claims, but surely the way forward is to focus on what can be done to improve safety in the first place. I appreciate that calling for a 'safety culture' may not be such a headline-grabber, but you cannot justify needless injuries and deaths simply because 'safety' is not high enough on the politicians' 'what's hot' list.


Colin Ettinger is president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers