The Compensation Culture Is Destroying Us


Compensation has taken over from the football pools and the lottery as the way to get rich quick.

The compensation culture now costs the police £330 million a year (around 7% of its total wage bill). One former ex policeman received nearly £90,000 compensation for the trauma of seeing a woman die after he crashed into her car during a 999 call (policemen cause a tremendous number of accidents - so many, indeed, that one force has stopped its drivers from speeding). The husband of the woman killed by the policeman received £16,000 compensation.

A former female police officer was awarded (it is tempting to use the word `won') an estimated £1,000,000 in a package, after complaining of bullying and sexual and racial harassment.

A police woman who slipped on a banana skin at work claimed £200,000 compensation - though she was already receiving a police pension. (The maximum pay-out for a victim of crime from the criminal injuries compensation authority is £250,000 for paralysis or loss of all four limbs. Someone who is the victim of a gang rape may receive £10,000 and someone who receives moderate brain damage as a result of an assault may receive £15,000.)

There is growing concern at the way British lawyers are adopting the ambulance chasing habits of their American counterparts. Most people now realise that there is no point in expecting lawyers to campaign for justice because the lawyers are too busy making money out of the system; using greedy citizens to help them suck money out of our corporate and public institutions. The system seems designed to ensure that the litigation will only stop when the lawyers have got all the money. In America three out of every ten people have already been sued (or are about to be sued).

My wife, the Welsh Princess, tripped and dived gracefully onto the pavement during a shopping expedition. She ruined a pair of tights and hurt her leg quite badly. It wasn't difficult to find a cause for the fall. The pavement where she fell was quite uneven.

`The pavement isn't our responsibility, you know,' said a worried looking shopkeeper. He had come hurrying out of his shop when he had seen my wife take a tumble.

I was busy providing the appropriate medically approved support, but I paused and looked up, puzzled.

`You have to sue the council,' he said. `Not me.'

I frowned. `Why would we want to sue anyone?'

The shopkeeper glanced in my wife's direction and then looked back at me. He seemed puzzled. I suddenly realised that he automatically expected us to sue someone.

`I wasn't looking properly,' said the Welsh Princess. `It was my fault.'

Sadly, I suspect that is a phrase which we won't be hearing much of in the future.

The shopkeeper's reaction was understandable. These days growing numbers of people are learning to regard every accident as a potential lawsuit.

This is of course one of those terrible, destructive American habits.

Remember the woman who won a million because she spilt a cup of hot coffee on herself and got scalded?

And the burglar who won massive damages after falling through a skylight?

And the would-be-suicide who threw himself under a train, survived and won damages from the train company?

And the woman who sued a gun company because her husband shot himself with one of their products?

All are American examples of lawsuit madness. The latest fad is for fat Americans to sue food manufacturers for making them fat. (Haven't any of these people ever heard of the word `responsibility'? Do the lawyers involved realise that if they win these lawsuits - and there are a number of them pending - they will have `legalised' the right of individuals to hand over just about every aspect of their own lives to others?)

Now the madness has come to Britain. Common sense is now rarer than snow in Tahiti. When a surgeon removed both of a patient's legs by mistake the patient received a modest cash settlement in damages. The surgeon was allowed to carry on unpunished. Since the doctor's insurance company paid all the costs of the lawsuit the doctor suffered only some embarrassment and, perhaps, remorse. But when a company boss innocently complimented a female employee on her dress she sued him for sexual harassment and received a vast sum in damages. Her boss was publicly censored and then demoted. Compare and contrast, as schoolteachers used to say, back in the days when schools were encouraged to teach the English language to their pupils.

Who do you think pays for all this nonsensical ligitation?

It's certainly not the insurance companies.

It's you and I.

Those wretched companies which advertise for customers in newspapers and on TV encourage the assumption that whatever happens there is always someone to blame - and to sue.

They have helped create a world in which disatisfaction leads to blame; we are taught that when something goes wrong we should always look for someone else to take responsibility; we are taught, by the lawyers, that when we are disappointed in some way we should expect a financial payout. Out there, somewhere, there will be an organisation, a department, a company or an individual with money in the bank. And even if the lawsuit is frivolous most victims of legal harassment (and it is, so often, the defendants who are the real victims) will settle in order to avoid a lengthy and expensive trial. The defendant will know that the plaintiff's costs, however vast they may become, will be carried by his or her lawyer, working for a share of the profits. The ambulance chasing lawyers who are involved in this sort of legal chicanery get rich because when they win they can win (literally) billions. Innocent defendants know that they have a choice: they either spend years (and all the money they can raise) fighting the case or else they settle out of court.

The really sad thing about all this is that disatisfaction can be (and always used to be) a trigger to creativeness.

Edwin Land invented the Polaroid Instant camera after his three-year-old daughter wanted to know why she couldn't see a photograph as soon as it was taken. He didn't sue the camera maker or the photograph developer. Walt Disney created Disneyland after taking his two young daughters to a disappointingly tawdry local amusement park. The park was operated by surly employees and full of bored parents and unhappy children. Instead of sueing the park owner Disney created something positive out of his miserable experience. When an American family had a miserable time at a roadside motel near Washington the father of the family, Kemmons Wilson founded the Holiday Inns hotel chain instead of consulting a lawyer.

Today, however, instead of using the grain of sand as an irritant to create a pearl we expect the grain of sand to produce a lawsuit.

There are nearly one million lawyers working in the USA; that's more than one for every ten businesses. All those lawyers have to do something for a living (they can't all go into politics) and so Americans are encouraged to sue each other all the time. Not long ago an American passenger sued an airline for serving free peanuts.

Naturally, most litigants do not yet realise (and probably never will) that the only people to get really rich from litigation are the lawyers. At least one lawyer is reputed to have made more than a billion dollars out of the settlement made with the big tobacco companies.

Invariably, the litigants who take action (the smokers, the people injured by prescription drugs, the individuals who claim money as a result of accidents at work or in the street) receive neither justice nor much money. The people who really make the big money out of all this litigation are the lawyers.

Adopting the American method of allowing lawyers to share in the proceeds has further led to a serious deterioration in our system of justice and a wider deterioration in the quality of life in Britain.

Insurance policy premiums have rocketed as insurance companies claw back the money they are having to pay out. Many small businessmen have gone bust because they cannot afford the premiums they've been expected to pay. Public services have deteriorated still further as cetnral and local governments are forced to spend an increasing amount of money and time fighting or settling legal battles brought by people who have seen a small piece of misfortune as an opportunity to get rich quick.

Naturally, many people have sought to get rich quickly without having to undergo the pain and inconvience of an accident. Others have found ways to find someone else to blame for an accident for which they were responsible. For example, One man received a payout of £238,000 in compensation from his local council after claiming (wrongly it turned out four years later) that he had broken his ankle in a pot hole. (How much would he have got if he had been really seriously injured I wonder?)

Claims of this type are now big business. Council officials in Liverpool set aside £5.3 million of rate payers money to cover potential payouts to people who sued after claiming that they had tripped on uneven pavements. In the year 2000, Liverpool Council received 2,200 claims from people who had tripped over in what are called `highway related incidents'; people wanting compensation for injuries caused by uneven pavements and kerbstones. In 2001 it was 4,000. In 2002 it was 6,000 and rising fast. Other cities have similar bills. Council officials reckon 80% of claims are false. One man was in prison on the date when he claimed he had fallen. Another apparently files a claim every year in time for Christmas. One entire family claimed they had been hurt tripping over the same stretch of pavement. One council spokesman said: `A lot of these claims are down to the very aggressive sales tactics used by ambulance chasing insurance companies offering people no win no fee lawsuits. Many people think they can put in claims because they have nothing to lose.'

There seems no end to the imagination of those bringing lawsuits.

Just before Christmas 2003, it was announced that a postman was sueing a university lecturer for posting too many letters. The postman claimed that he had pulled a back muscle after lifting a sackful of journals the lecturer had posted. The lecturer had put the mail into a standard red pillar box. The postman's claim was being funded by his trade union.

A schoolteacher who damaged knee ligaments after slipping on a chip outside a school canteen was awarded £55,000. Thousands of employees who have, often through their own carelessness, had a minor accident, have sued an employer who has provided them with secure employment for much of their lives. The sums of money won are often derisory after the lawyers have taken their share but the relationships between employees and employers have been permanently destroyed. Large companies, which have their own in-house lawyers can cope with litigation of this kind. But people running small businesses invariably find such litigation devastating.

The end result, of course, is that the people who really do have a right to complain lose out.

They lose out because, however honest their claim, they will be treated as liars and cheats by insurance company lawyers who are desperate to minimise their clients' losses.

But perhaps the worst result of all this is the fact that government departments, local councils and many large corporations have become extremely defensive when dealing with complaints.

It has long been acknowledged, in both public and private service as, indeed, in all walks of life, that if you make a mistake you risk damaging the trust between your organisation and your `customers'.

The best way to repair this loss of trust has always been to listen and, where appropriate, to apologise; to put things right as quickly as possible, keeping the complainant fully informed.

Do this, so the argument always went, and you would be able to repair the trust between you and the complainant; you might, indeed, make that sense of trust stronger than ever, in the same way that when damaged skin heals, a scar is eventually produced which will be tougher than ever. Fail to listen and to act on complaints, went the argument, and all trust will eventually be lost.

These days no one dares listen to complaints any more; they are terrified of the legal consequences. An apology is seen to be a blank cheque for a lawsuit.

Nowadays, instead of responding to a complaint with a genuine attempt to understand the complainant's point of view, and to learn from their unhappy experience and to make sure that the same thing doesn't happen again, the department or company receiving the complaint will defend their employee at all costs. They do this because it's what their lawyers tell them to do. Accepting a complaint and dealing with it sympathetically is simply too risky; it is too likely to result in a lawsuit. An apology, which may be regarded as a legal admission of guilt, is far too dangerous.

What a world we have created.


Taken from Why Everything Is Going To Get Worse Before It Gets Better (And What You Can Do About It) by Vernon Coleman, published by Blue Books at £15.99. The book is available from the shop on this Website or from all terrestial bookshops and Web-based bookshops.


Copyright Vernon Coleman 2004


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