Personal injury news
Suing over everyday mishaps
Mind that pavement, handle your coffee with care and beware that hanging basket above your head. Everyday life is out to get you, but it can also earn you a tidy sum. We're all potential litigants now. As you venture out of a morning, the scope for a mishap - and a corresponding compensation claim - seems limitless. For a start, watch your step on those uneven pavements. Just last month we reported that Glasgow City Council paid out £294,000 in compensation to people claiming falls on the city's pavements, double the amount paid out the previous year. And Edinburgh City Council got off lightly when, earlier this month, the Court of Session threw out a personal injury claim for £50,000 made by the Labour MSP Gordon Jackson, QC, who broke his shoulder slipping on an icy pavement.
But it's not just walking the streets which is seen as potentially hazardous/ profitable. Earlier this month an Aberdeen primary school, Airyhall, was believed to be the first in Scotland to cancel a planned outing to a Perthshire outdoor centre after the NASUWT teaching union advised members against taking pupils on trips because of the risk of being sued.
Society was becoming "increasingly litigious", claimed Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, who told MPs conducting an inquiry into outdoor education that teachers should not expose themselves to possible legal action by taking pupils on outdoor activities or visits. Such moves have been spurred by accidents such as the drowning of ten-year-old Max Palmer in the Lake District; the teacher in charge of Palmer's school party was jailed.
That was an extreme and tragic example, but other schools have taken what appear to be excessive measures to forestall legal action. One in Wiltshire told pupils they couldn't use full-sized footballs during playground kick-arounds, while another in Cumbria issued pupils with industrial goggles before they played conkers - "the kind of thing that gives health and safety a bad name," muttered one Health and Safety Executive official.
The humble horse chestnut tree, in fact, has come under scrutiny more than once in the wave of defensive practices. Other councils have threatened to remove roadside horse chestnut trees on the grounds that children might run into the path of traffic while collecting the nuts.
But while your offspring are supposedly facing all manner of hazards in the playground jungle, you'd better look out for rogue street furniture - Suffolk County Council banned hanging baskets in case they fell on the heads of passers-by.
Are we really becoming so fast on the draw with our writs or, as an article in the New Statesman put it, "Is suing the new shopping"?
The Lord Chancellor told an insurance conference that whether we described it as "compensation culture", "claims culture" or "have-a-go culture", we should be very concerned at its effects. "It creates a fear of litigation, can make organisations risk-averse, cause local authorities to cancel events, doctors to practise defensive medicine," he said. "It creates burdens for those handling claims. And, critically, it undermines genuine claims."
Yet, overall, the Law Society of Scotland says litigation cases are actually down while, in a report earlier this year, the Government's Better Regulation Task Force insisted the UK's "compensation culture" was an urban myth, but one which resulted in local authorities spending a "staggering" amount of money dealing with compensation claims.
So perhaps we should read this as defensive culture rather than compensation culture - what the philosopher Roger Scruton has called the "cult of precaution". You might ponder that over your morning coffee - though check its temperature first: an icon of the perceived compensation culture as exported from the US is Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman who was hospitalised with third-degree burns after scalding herself with a coffee she bought at McDonald's. A jury awarded her $200,000 compensatory damages and $2.7 million punitive damages.
Scots are apparently getting more litigious, although on a far smaller scale than their counterparts in England and Wales. This may be down to tighter controls on legal aid in Scotland, as well as a dearth of solicitors specialising in medical claims. "It's hard to say whether or not Scots are more reluctant to come forward or whether we just have a better health service," a spokeswoman for the British Medical Association Scotland says. "Certainly we are starting to see some large pay-outs to individuals complaining treatment has gone wrong or their expectations haven't been met, but we should welcome that because we can learn from mistakes."
Figures for 2002-2003 show Scots were awarded £9.4 million in medical negligence claims, compared to £448 million in England alone, and the charity Action Against Medical Accidents has said Scots patients are losing our on deserved claims.
Many exorbitant claims which make headlines ultimately fail to stand up in court, says Ronnie Conway, a personal injuries solicitor with Bonnar & Co, and a member of the Law Society of Scotland's Civil Procedure Committee, who believes the "compensation culture" is exaggerated. "You get what's effectively a cartoon version of what the law courts are about being perpetrated on the public," he says.
In the case of pupils on education visits, he points out, there are well-established good-practice guidelines covering situations such as swimming pools or pupil-teacher ratios on outdoor courses: "I suspect that anyone reading these would regard them as common sense rather than the nanny state and, unless an injured person can show a break of these regulations, which are all based on risk assessment, or can show that the teacher in performance of his or her duties on a trip fell below what's almost the standard of any proficient teacher, the claimant will fail.
"However, if it's simply fear of hassle and complaints, I can well understand why teachers might not want to volunteer. You're always going to get people who complain about the number of crisps in the packet."
