Metro jumps on “compensation culture” bandwagon

While travelling on a very packed Northern Line tube train this morning, my eye was caught by the front page of the Metro and the headline “Injury payout pupils cash in” emblazoned along the top. The article quotes all sorts of figures like the fact that children “raked in” £2.25 million last year from compensation claim payouts, and that 10 children a week are winning “thousands of pounds in payouts from the public purse”. However, it wasn’t the figures quoted that bothered me so much, it was the so-called experts quoted in the article that really made my blood boil. A sociology professor calls compensation claims against schools “immoral” and says that “the government should ban litigation against the public sector”!! Unbelievable! If schools protected their students appropriately, and provided safe environments for them to be educated in, then accidents in schools could be avoided and pupils would not need to make compensation claims against schools at all. Obviously the so-called “compensation culture “and “rise of no win no fee solicitors firms” gets blamed for all of this. It worries me that the general public buy into this hype and that access to justice could be harmed as a result.