'Actuarial tables with explanatory notes for use in personal injury and fatal accident cases' being a mouthful, it is not surprising that they should have become known as the Ogden tables, since I was chairman of the working party which prepared them.

This, although flattering, conceals the fact that the tables were prepared by the government actuary's department (GAD) and are published for the GAD by HMSO.

I suspect that when Lord Bridge, in Hunt v Severs [1994] 2 All ER 385, spoke of 'the table which appears in Kemp & Kemp', he had forgotten that the tables were prepared by the GAD and that the government actuary was a member of the working party.The working party was set up, with the Lord Chancellor's approval, because actuaries - many of whom are employed by insurers - complained that awards made by the courts in fatal cases and to compensate plaintiffs permanently unable to work for loss of earnings etc, were too low, the reason being that the number of years by which a loss is multiplied ('the multiplier') in order to assess the overall loss or expense was too low.

The members of the working party were lawyers and actuaries nominated by their professional bodies in the UK.

It was not a plaintiffs' pressure group.It is only during my time at the Bar that actuaries began to be called to give expert evidence, save in exceptional cases.

Before then, judges had had to cope with this actuarial problem largely unaided, in effect being forced to act as amateur actuaries.

Consistency being essential, there came into existence multipliers which were used in all personal injury cases.Once this system became established it is not surprising that when told by an actuarial witness that, say, a multiplier of 16 years, which was regarded as the 'conventional' maximum, was too low, judges felt constrained by precedent to disagree.

As Lord Bridge put it in Hunt v Severs: 'The courts have been traditionally mistrustful of reliance on actuarial tables as the primary basis of calculation, approving their use only as a check on assessments arrived at by the familiar conventional methods.'The first edition of the tables was published in 1984.

These tables took no account of risks other than mortality, such as permanent loss of employment due to long-term illness.

Consequently, judges stuck to the conventional multipliers, although there appears to have been a tendency to increase them to some extent.The second edition of the tables was published in 1994, unfortunately after Hunt v Severs was decided.

In this edition the GAD was able to give assistance in respect of contingencies other than mortality, as well as occupational and regional differences.In my view, the judges who established the existing conventional multipliers did an excellent job given the minimal nature of information available to them.

However, in the light of the GAD's new figures, it is plain that we have been seriously under-compensating young plaintiffs or their dependents and older plaintiffs to a lesser extent.The Law Commission report No.224, 'Structural settlements and interim and provisional damages', said: 'We consider that judicial ignorance and suspicion of the tables are no longer justified, if indeed they ever were.' I consider this criticism harsh and do not subscribe to it.

I prefer to say that now the GAD has provided the necessary information, it would be unjust for the courts to ignore it.

I go further: judges do not substitute their own views in preference to opinions of other professional witnesses and they ought not to do it in respect of actuarial evidence.A subsidiary argument in the explanatory notes is that index-linked government stocks should provide the basis upon which the appropriate discount rate and hence the multiplier should be based.

Suffice it to say that when in Lim v Camden [1980] AC 174 Lord Diplock said that multipliers assumed a discount rate of between 4% and 5% he was speaking the year before index-linked government stock was first issued.

This stock enables a multiplier to be selected which makes it possible to match the receipts from the investment of the lump sum calculated by using the discount rate appropriate to such stocks almost precisely to the loss for which the plaintiff is being compensated.

The working party concluded that this argument cannot be faulted, and the Law Commission agreed.The rates are published in the Financial Times and the data page of the Gazette, the February 1995 edition of which showed the current rate to be 3.9%.In Hunt v Severs Lord Bridge said that if utilising actuarial tables it was essential that the particular calculation relied on 'should be precisely in point'.

The new tables will enable this to be done in almost all cases.

What is needed is for someone to take an uncomplicated case to the Court of Appeal as soon as possible.If this does not happen soon, legislation will be needed.

The Law Commission has drafted a Bill providing that GAD tables should be admissible in evidence and that the return to be expected from investment of the lump sum awarded should take account of the return on index-linked government security, unless it is shown that a different rate is more appropriate.I hope that the government will make time for this simple legislation; if not, I trust that a private member's Bill would be forthcoming.

Finally, I emphasise that I came to this problem with an open mind.

I hold no brief for the GAD calculations.

While I have not been told of any criticisms of them, if any are substantiated the tables can be altered to reflect it.