Lord Young and the Compensation Culture myth

Lord Youngs report Common Sense, Common Safety promotes a series of recommendations for improving the stance of health and safety. Lord Youngs report allegedly ensures that health and safety is taken critically by employers and the general public, while ensuring the burden on small business is as trivial as possible. Further to this, Lord Youngs emphasis is on the Compensation Culture that he believes has occurred through the heavily criticized media.

Youngs recommendations include:

Examining the option of extending the RTA scheme upper limit to 25,000. Introducing a simplified claims procedure for personal injury claims on a fixed cost basis. Restrict the way in which referral agencies and personal injury lawyers operate with restrictions on advertising.

The aim of Lord Young is to simplify the claims procedure, condense the time taken to agree damages and to reduce costs. There is no real detail or explanation in Lord Youngs report as to how this would be achieved by comparison one can remember the difficulties that Lord Justice Jackson encountered when trying to attain a consensus on the problems of costs between claimant and defendant bodies. It is absurd that no framework has been set out in his report as to how Lord Young aims to put into practice such proposals. Overall, Lord Young seems to give the impression of watch this space.

Lord Young states the general impression created is that, no matter how trivial or unsubstantiated a claim for damages may be, there is a firm of lawyers ready and waiting to pursue it. It is understandable that there will be a firm of lawyers ready to pursue the claim as after all that is what lawyers do; provide legal representation to those who claim to have been injured, as a result of negligence or wrongdoing.

It is rather absurd for Lord Young to then go on further to say lawyers are only too willing to pounce with a claim for damages on the slightest pretext. Does he find Personal Injury lawyers to be ominous? Is it erroneous for me to say, Personal Injury lawyers get a sense of fulfillment when they attain damages for a well deserved claimant? I think not. Is it immoral when they get paid merely if the claim is successful? This clearly indicates that Personal Injury lawyers work in the best interest of their clients and should not be labeled as villains as portrayed by Lord Young.

The suggestion that we are living in a compensation culture arises problems with Lord Youngs report. Is it wrong for the public to claim for something that is rightly theirs? There is no such thing as a compensation culture; it is a myth that is fueled by perception. From the stakeholders that Lord Young consulted, the majority indicated that they did not think there was a growing compensation culture in Britain. This seems to contradict the philosophy adopted by Lord Youngs idea of compensation culture. Is it really a bad thing making businesses over-cautious with regards to health and safety? Surely, it is a good thing adopting high standards of health and safety.