The blame society results from clumsy laws, says judge

AMBULANCE-CHASING lawyers are not to blame for Britain’s compensation culture, a Supreme Court judge has said, as it is the way the system is set up that encourages claims.

Lord Sumption said people seeking compensation cannot be accused of greed when it was the law that was “extraordinarily clumsy and inefficient”, adding that the system of blame “often misses the target”.

He said: “If the law entitles the victim of an accident to compensation, it ill becomes us to criticise him for knowing it and claiming.” A rise in claims, which in part might be blamed on the proliferation of no-win no-fee services, “ambulance-chasing lawyers” and cold call firms encouraging people to sue, has also meant a rise in insurance costs, particularly for motorists. There is also concern about fake claims and some of the large sums paid out by the NHS in compensation.

Earlier this year, tour operators warned the government that Britons faced being denied access to resorts and hotels abroad because of a surge in compensation demands for “fake” holiday illnesses, like food poisoning.

In the Queen’s Speech, the Government promised to “modernise the courts system and help reduce motor insurance premiums’”, including a ban on payouts without medical evidence and fixed tariffs on whiplash claims.

But Lord Sumption, who as a barrister won complex legal cases for Roman Abramovich against billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky and for the Government in the infamous “sexedup” Iraq dossier allegations with the BBC, told the Personal Injuries Bar Association annual lecture this may not go far enough. “If the law says that we are entitled to blame other people for our misfortunes, it is really rather absurd to complain about a culture of blame, as if this was somehow a symptom of a collective moral degeneration,” he said.

Since 1973 the number of injury claims has risen fivefold, largely due to road accident claims, which account for around 80 per cent of all cases.

However, the number of accidents has not increased, so the rise in claims can only be due in part to better understanding of what can be claimed, he said. But this has somewhat rebounded on society. He added: “Almost all of us pay in the form of higher insurance premiums or taxes.” He warned that ultimately insurers in extreme cases would simply withdraw from covering “exposed sectors”, as they did in the US with product liability insurance.

He concluded: “The law of tort is an extraordinarily clumsy and inefficient way of dealing with serious cases of personal injury. It often misses the target, or hits the wrong target. It makes us no safer, while producing undesirable side effects. What is more, it does all of these things at disproportionate cost and with altogether excessive delay.”

But despite his criticism, he said: “I have no doubt that it will survive.”