THE landmark legal ruling that is expected to cost the Government £7.5 billion was delivered by a High Court judge in January 1998.
At the end of a 119-day trial, the longest personal injury case in British legal history, Mr Justice Turner ruled in favour of six former miners with chest diseases (COPD) who claimed that their health had been ruined by years of inhaling coal dust underground.
British Coal was found to be negligent at common law and in breach of its duties under the Mines and Quarries Act. Damages ranged from £3,200 to £10,500.
The previous autumn, the High Court in Newcastle upon Tyne had awarded £127,000 in damages to seven former miners suffering from vibration white finger (VWF). It ruled that British Coal was negligent in that it should have known about the risks associated with vibrating tools. As British Coal no longer existed, responsibility fell on the Department of Trade and Industry.
The Government thought the bill for settling an anticipated 100,000 claims might, at worst, reach £1 billion. This would turn out to be a gross under estimate. The courts ordered the DTI and miners’ solicitors to agree detailed arrangements for registering, processing and settling compensation claims by miners, their widows or their families.
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On two separate dates in 1999, with a great fanfare of publicity, the Government announced that it had reached and signed an agreement for both sets of diseases with the claimants’ solicitors.
No similar announcements were made when, in the same year, DTI officials quietly signed separate compensation agreements for both diseases with the leaders of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers and Vendside, a claims-handling company owned by the 984 members of the union’s Nottinghamshire section.
A total of 770,000 claims have been registered and £2.5 billion has been paid in compensation for the 312,000 cases settled so far.
Solicitors’ firms have earned £530 million in legal costs for their work and the UDM/Vendside has been paid an additional £19 million in costs for the thousands of cases it registered and settled in-house.
The average compensation payment to UDM claimants is £8,391 for VWF and £4,375 for COPD. The average DTI costs payment received by the UDM/Vendside for each case it settles is £760 for VWF and £1,726 for COPD.
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When the final claim is settled, estimated to be 2007 for VWF and 2009 for COPD, in what have become the world’s two largest personal injury compensation schemes, the Government’s bill is estimated at £7.5 billion.
If the proportion of compensation to legal costs stays the same, compensation payments will total £5.34 billion, solicitors’ costs £1.13 billion and £41 million in costs will have been paid, via Vendside, to the Nottinghamshire UDM.