Personal injury advice from
Thompsons Solicitors
Digging Deep as Economic Progress Comes at a Heavy Price
31st January 2005
ACROSS the Atlantic, vice-president Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, has just spent some $5bn (£2.7bn) extracting itself from a raft of asbestos-related litigation.
The global oil services group, which is expected to win the contract to oversee the final assembly of two new-generation aircraft carriers for our own Ministry of Defence, incurred the lion's share of these historic liabilities when it bought Dresser Industries in 1998.
The man who did that dubious deal escaped scrutiny at the time and remains, now in his second term in the White House, untouched by any consequences. However, resolving its asbestos hangover now will cost Halliburton almost as much as it paid for Dresser then.
Yet it is seen as a cleaner way of extricating the group from claims, rather than waiting for ever for all-encompassing agreement in a personal injury saga that, for years, has threatened to bankrupt whole industries in the US and throw thousands more workers out of their jobs.
Since his re-election, president Bush has renewed his calls for clear limits to be placed on all outstanding asbestos claims. This week the chairman of the senate judiciary committee, Senator Arlen Specter, will introduce a bill to create a $140bn trust fund designed to compensate victims, provided all sides drop the existing legal free-for-all. But as the Halliburton deal demonstrates, there's no real guarantee that Bush or Specter will prevail.
It's a very different story here, at least as far as personal injury claims from ex-coal miners and their families are concerned. Here, following court judgments in 1997 and 1998, the old state-owned British Coal was found negligent for both vibration white finger and respiratory lung diseases such as chronic bronchitis and emphysema.
On the break-up of British Coal these liabilities passed to the government, in the shape of the department of trade and industry. Yesterday DTI minister Nigel Griffiths gave the latest progress report on meeting outstanding claims. For anyone not familiar with a scheme that has been in existence since 1999, the numbers involved will come as quite a shock. Some 741,000 people have registered claims. Former miners and their families have already received £2.3bn in compensation.
The DTI is currently making payments on settled claims at a rate of around £2m each and every working day. The final bill could well top £8bn. It's well seen that Liberal Democrats, who want to abolish the DTI outright if ever they win power, don't boast too many MPs from old coalmining areas.
While most claim settlements are for relatively modest amounts – 80% of all offers made so far in the respiratory diseases scheme are for £10,000 or less – the most serious cases do attract much larger pay-outs. The biggest individual payments to date have been £130,000 for vibration white finger and £370,000 for lung disease.
While the BERR website points out that "these are the biggest personal injury schemes in British legal history and possibly the world", the minister is at pains to add that the government is "honouring its debt to former miners who sacrificed their health to power this country". With most of Britain's deep-mining capacity long gone, aggregate payments made under these compensation schemes are growing rapidly and must be proving a very important source of alternative economic stimulus for coalfield communities still struggling to find a fresh raison d'etre.
The DTI publishes a breakdown of aggregate compensation payments by parliamentary constituency. Easington, in north-east England, tops the list at nearly £83m so far. Only one Scottish constituency, Carrick Cumnock and Doon Valley, makes it into the top 25, at nearly £29m so far.
But by the end of 2004, overall payments to miners and their families in Scotland totalled nearly £173m. Between them, the two Dunfermline seats, including that of the chancellor Gordon Brown, and neighbouring Central Fife have seen payments to miners' families so far totalling nearly £38m. While claimants are free to do with the money what they choose, the large aggregate sums involved must be having a significant impact on local economies.
The schemes are also serious business for lawyers and the private sector groups like Capita and Atos Origin who carry out claim handling and medical assessment respectively. Each individual case is handled on its own merits, so meeting legal and administration costs does not come cheaply.
So far, in addition to the £2.3bn paid out in meeting claims, costs across the UK have totalled £563m. Scotland's share of that is currently running at some £38m. Both schemes are now closed to new entrants. Anyone who has missed the boat will have to pursue the old British Coal Corporation through the courts.
But the hundreds of thousands of claimants who got in before the door closed are testimony to the enduring fact that economic progress can come at a price. In this case, as with asbestos, the price in terms of broken health and compensation is very heavy indeed.
Copyright © 2005 Newsquest (Herald & Times) Limited - Story Filed by Alf Young - 25th January 2005
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