LETTERS: Half a million miners being encouraged to seek repayment of 'wrongly deducted' fees


Around half a million miners who made compensation claims for serious chest disease or vibration white finger are to receive letters from the Legal Complaints Service (LCS) encouraging them to seek repayment of fees which may have been wrongly deducted by solicitors.



The LCS is planning to write to every claimant, initially excluding dependants who raised claims posthumously. It has estimated that 502,210 claimants are potentially affected.



LCS chief executive Deborah Evans said miners will be contacted in phases, constituency by constituency, rather than en masse. They will need to raise claims within a 12-month cut-off period after receiving the LCS's letter.



'The aim is to try and resolve the problem over a set time period. Leaving it open-ended forever is not in the interests of former miners or the firms. Former miners are ill and some, sadly, are dying, so a quick resolution is better,' she told the Gazette.



The proposal is the result of a pilot programme that targeted sick miners who had been overcharged in the Rother Valley mining constituency. It is backed by mining constituency MPs, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Ministry of Justice.



However, Ms Evans warned that the scheme will be jeopardised if the LCS is forced to reopen 1,072 old cases to determine whether sick miners were short-changed on repayments and additional compensation by LSC caseworkers, as requested by the Legal Services Complaints Commissioner Zahida Manzoor last week (see [2008] Gazette, 12 January, 1).

Ms Evans said: 'The people we will be reaching out to haven't had any money back at all and they would now have the opportunity to raise a claim.



'Spending resources looking at files we have already looked at where miners have had the reduction back, in the main, in full and who have generally expressed a high degree of satisfaction... diverts resources away from where it is needed most.'



Ms Manzoor said she supported rolling out the Rother Valley initiative across mining communities but insisted the LCS should meet its target to reopen old files and deliver the new scheme.



'The LCS cannot continue to overlook where it needs to improve and purely focus on the positive... all vulnerable miners and their families need the LCS to use my findings to improve - and as a priority.



'Some of the issues raised in my report have been outstanding since 2006. This is about fairness and equality for all.'

The LCS is due to respond to the complaints commissioner's target by 31 January.



Anita Rice