We sit like rabbits in headlights as the juggernaut marked Compensation lumbers at us, waiting to be bunny-jam. The disease is rampant through the Anglophone, common law world, and where it is not being spread through the bathhouse morality of the legal profession, it is being assisted by the unprotected fecklessness of an insurance industry.
The figures are like battle casualties from the Somme over the marmalade: £650 million for Army deafness claims - which is actually £60 million less than it would cost to recapitalise our entire railway network over the next 15 years. Yet still the casualty figures roll in: 200 claims are added each month, with men who can hear whispered speech being able to claim £30,000 to £40,000 in compensation for hearing loss. And no end to this attrition seems in sight. Day and night, we hear the rumble of legal artillery, we see the flashes from the court through darkened skies: we are mired in battle eternal.
Not just us. In Britain last year, policemen won £120 million in compensation and injury-related early retirement. Some judgments belong to a justiciary world of almost LSD-induced bizarreness: 14 policemen present at the Hillsborough disaster (which was in part caused by policing errors) received £1.2 million in compensation for the mental damage they suffered, dwarfing the compensation given to the parents of children who died in that stadium.
Early retirement
Take the action by Det Sgt Thomas Bradley, who was accused of making false entries into his log, while acting as a chauffeur (using police vehicles) and as a bodyguard in police time. He reported sick when the investigation began, and sought early retirement on grounds of investigation-induced stress. Disciplinary charges were dropped, he retired on an enhanced pension and is now seeking compensation.
There are various strains within the general viral condition of the Grabbing, Acquisitive, Selfish Plaintiff Syndrome (GRASPS) and, as normal viruses imitate healthy tissue, the GRASPS virus can imitate healthy court actions, from which they become indistinguishable with the administration of the mind-altering substance called the law. We have seen a couple of such healthy and proper court actions quite recently, involving irreparable perinatal damage to infants.
One involved a payment of £2.75 million to a seven-year-old girl, another was of £1.75 million to a brain-damaged boy. The broader community must of course do everything possible for both the children and their parents - but what is the point of handing over capital sums in such cases? Would it not be appropriate for capital sums to be allocated for whatever alterations are required to the children's homes, and then for the parents, firstly, and in later years the victims, to have access to the earnings from the capital sum, but not to the capital sum itself?
Victims' families
In other words - and I speak in general terms - should the family of an accident victim, a deafness litigant, a garda who has slipped and hurt his big toe, be capitally enriched in the event of the death of that person? Why should capital transfers be made from either form of public purse, firstly the central exchequer, or secondly the privatised taxation fund called insurance, to families who are related to the initial victim?
Within the military domain, there was already a scheme for compensating soldiers who were injured in the line of duty. It is called the Disability Pension. Needless to say, because it means no money for solicitors, because it involves no irrevocable transfers of capital, and because it assesses disability on a strictly pro-rata business, it has not proved popular in a world beset by the GRASPS virus. But, old as it is, might it not be the way forward? Might we not stopper the bottomless black hole inhaling public finances if we compelled litigants to exhaust existing legal remedies before they sought redress in the courts?
Capital transfers
The Army Disability Pension is a good and civilised model for all those who need care from the public purse: not capital transfers, but initially as capital for whatever structural alterations are necessary for those with disabilities, and then as a government-backed base for an assured index-related income which is returned to the central exchequer from either insurance company or government upon death, with discretionary administrative powers to be exercised by some independent authority if extra expenditure be justified.
To be sure, this scheme will not endear itself. Solicitors and barristers might find it less enriching, and the victims of GRASPS who had hoped their hearing loss, such as it is, might lead to a 4x4 cross-country vehicle and maybe even a conservatory and a new shower room are unlikely to be doing handstands at the prospect. But if they live long enough - and surely they would want to? - such settlements, tax-free, no less, would mean more money for them, but less money for lawyers. And what advice do you think the latter will continue to give? They will continue to cast aspersions on Susan's IQ: in other words, sue, you fool.