Appalling injustice

MONEY is poor compensation for most real misfortunes. Cash will never bring back what has been lost.

All the money in the world cannot restore a lost limb. It is very hard to work out a scale for such payments.

Yet by any measure it is surely absurd that a soldier who lost a leg after being shot by accident should receive only a tenth of the payout for stress given to the man who was in charge of the gun.

No doubt such stress is very real in the lives of many. And it must be endlessly painful to have been involved in such a gruesome event with such irrevocable consequences. But it is nonsensical to value such an experience as ten times worse than the amputation of a leg.

A system which produces such ridiculous outcomes is surely in urgent need of reform.

The American ‘no-win, no-fee’ principle, introduced here at the end of the last century, was meant to save public money by cutting the Legal Aid bill. In fact – driven by lawyers seeking their percentages – it has been followed by a huge increase in lawsuits and gigantic, often disproportionate, settlements.

No system for awarding compensation can be perfect, but almost anything would be better than this.