A bonanza for the lawyers
WORKERS, SEPT 2007 ISSUE
The National Audit Office has revealed that two-thirds of former miners – 296,000 out of 430,000 – suffering from lung disease or other coal-mining industrial diseases have received less in compensation than the lawyers administering the scheme. The Labour government's acceptance that compensation should be paid to miners after the historic 1998 High Court decision against British Coal (rather than appealing against the decision) was a great step forward.
But the administration of the £4.1 billion compensation scheme plus the £2.3 billion administration costs, the largest personal injury settlement scheme to-date in the world, has resulted in hundreds of millions of pounds going to lawyers. In total over 575,000 coal-related health claims were lodged by ex-miners. The average settlement per miner was £3200; the lawyers received a sum of £2,000 per case as a flat rate starter payment. The ten top-earning legal firms have tended to be the labour movement's own legal firms. These firms have benefited from the scheme when traditionally they have had to fight each case individually, whether for "black lung" or "white finger" vibration. Though these firms are not to blame as to how the scheme was established and run, there remains the whiff of scandal associated with the Union of Democratic Mineworkers, the scab union which the Tories set up during the 1984-85 strike, which has further eaten into the compensation to ex-miners by charging costs to claimants.