Agreed, stats can be misleading Ray. I too wondered whether the figure included those claims settled out of court (like to bet it doesn't) and to be honest that is the area where I find most of the idiotic claims are settled (a small amount of compensation instead of an expensive court case is what I've been told by insurers).

Ray,

Good point regarding out of court settlements. That would make the figure even bigger. I have to admit, I tended to want to believe what the TUC and ROSPA were saying that the compensation thing is a myth - especially as I am very skeptical of the tabloid press. However, I am not so convinced by them now - especially seeing the figures that I think the TUC used. To follow the maths further, if it was 9 out of 10 and we don't know for sure if that is the case, that would make it 755,000/60m x 100% x 10 = 12.5 % of population submitting claims every year!! (i.e. 1 in 8 people) I wonder however, if the number of out of court settlements may have gone down as insurance companies may have got better at fighting fraudulant claims. An insurance broker told me that was the case. Just a thought - no idea if this is really the case or not. I wonder if any of this stuff is being measured and reviewed in a proper scientific way!?

Work: What compensation culture?

In the Select Committee inquiry written and oral evidence on Compensation Culture, published in February 2006 the Lord Chief Justice quoted figures from the Compensation Recovery Unit ‘to which all claims for personal injuries are supposed to be reported, whether they result in a judgment or settlement’. These figures showed a drop of 5% in the last 5 years. (2000 – 2005)

He went on to say ‘If you take out of the equation claims for road traffic accident injuries, which are probably not influenced by any kind of culture, then the drop is very much more substantial: employer’s liability 20%, …..’

The nine years up to 2009 show that the number of personal injury claims related to employers’ liability has gone down – please note the word ‘down’. [Source: Cost benefit analysis of policy options related to referral fees in legal services: Legal Services Board: prepared by Charles River Associates: May 2010]

In the four year period 2005-09 the success rate for Employer Liability claims went from 77% to 55%.

So. There are less EL claims than there were. And the fewer claimants today are less successful than they were four years ago. How on earth does this equate with ‘mad world’ compensation culture at work?

I’ve been around a while as well.

What I’m sick of is workers who are injured and diseased by the negligence of the managers who employ them; no claim is made because they are too frightened of a number of things – including deportation – or don’t know they can make a claim.

Oh yes and nothing is done to the employer whose negligence caused the problem in the first place. [According to ‘intensive inspections’ in construction by the HSE over many years we can recon that 25% of construction sites have ‘serious and imminent dangers’ to the people working on them on a regular basis – figure equates to the % of Prohibition Notices issued during what used to be called ‘blitzes’.]

As for the call to prosecute more workers, I’m reminded of a cartoon in a Hazards Magazine in the 1970’s. Picture owner in top hat and tails shouting at worker with fingers cut off and blood spurting. ‘It’s my land; my factory; my organisation; my machine; and your fault!’

For those interested in 19th Century worker abuse as practiced in the 21st Century, you can read the ‘Inquiry into recruitment and employment in the meat and poultry processing sector’ published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in March 2010.

http://www.equalityhuman.../meat_inquiry_report.pdf

Ha publishing evidence of worker abuse. No doubt the HER Commission will be high on the Government’s hit list of quangos to cut.

Cheers.

Nigel

Thanks Nigel for shedding some light on this. This is the kind of response I most respect because you are backing up your opinions with your sources.

Here is a link to the Charles River Associates Document you referred to; http://tiny.cc/cd23x

Interesting read. I havn't got time to read it all at the moment but jumping to the graph on page 98 illustrates the trend and overal slight decline in employers liability claims - up to 2009. Also of interest is the comparison of employer liability v motor claims. In 2008 there were 625k motor claims compared to only 87K employers liability claims. So doing my number crunching to try and make sense of it; 87,000/60,000,000(the population) x 100% = .14% of the population, or to work this out as a proportion of the population that would be 100/.14 = 714 which relates to 1 in 714 people making a claim a year. Not sure what the working population is. I think it used to be something like 25 to 30m. So you could half the figure to say 1 in about 360 working people making a claim each year - yes a claim - not actual litigation. Starting to feel less like a compensation culture now. If my maths rumblings are wrong which they may well be please correct me.

Fair point. I'm no insurance expert. I presume the examples you give would be public liabiltiy rather than employer liability? Even so, I presume they would mostly be S3 of H&S at Work Act cases. Perhaps the review should be a review of public safety rather than being a review of Health and Safety at work. Perhaps it is. I am not sure of the brief.

Dear All

The Policy Exchange report ‘Health and Safety – Reducing the burden’ has a forward by David Young, a trained lawyer. In December 2009 David Cameron went to Policy Exchange and launched his future plans for reviewing health and safety legislation. So this Policy Exchange report – in the words of David Young – is to ‘establish some basic facts about health and safety and pose some questions.’

I have read the Policy Exchange document several times. It is the worst researched report of this type I have ever read. That is quite an achievement in itself. It cannot get basic facts right; has managed to use the wrong statistics from the reports they quote in key sections; uses several quotes in a deliberately misleading way; mixes up civil cases with criminal law; and has used Daily Mail stories – an other newspapers - as a supposed source of ‘authoritative’ information, leading to the erroneous conclusion that the health and safety world has gone mad and we need to put it right.

As a result, their analysis is laughable and they ask the wrong questions. At the same time they make not one point about the real ‘burden’ of health and safety at work: the huge emotional, financial, organisational and commercial burden that accidents and ill-health costs this nation and its citizens year in year out.

So, in my view, this is a political review – like the health and safety deregulation review to reduce burdens on employers resulting in the ‘Review of Health and Safety Regulation’ report published in May 1994, forced on the HSC by a previous Tory administration, at that time without Lib Dem help.

Those who may be offended by such overtly politically partisan views from me should read the IOSH comments on the Policy Exchange report – which are available. There are so many errors in the Policy Exchange report that the IOSH response document is nearly as long as the original think tank document!

Oh yes. There does need to be a review of health and safety at work. Its objective should be to identify weakness and highlight the strengths. Its outcome should be aimed at improving what we have already got. Various reviews on regulation have already repeatedly confirmed that the regulatory framework is OK. However, we need to be clear in interpretation; be much better at communication; be more creative in health and safety training; make better use of sector based solutions; and start applying lessons in motivation across the board.

To conclude: I’m a consultant and I do not mind looking at competency issues and this is already in hand. I repeat, I believe this to be a politically driven review. I do however take great exception to MPs in Government talking about competency of health and safety consultants when they have no job description; an expenses system they made up themselves that no other organisation or self employed person would be permitted to have by the Inland Revenue; who need no qualifications; and are principally only barred if they are either bankrupt or certified insane.

Buzz: Thanks for your comment.

Cheers.

Nigel

Can IOSH host a list of regulations that we, the professionals, agree are a nonsense, or at the very least in need of a good shake up to sort out what is sensible and reasonable and what is not? I would like to nominate the asbestos section of the REACH regs. I can see why the EU might need it generally, but we already had a very good set of regs. REACH has labeling requirements (for example), that mean every part of an aeroplane on display, that has asbestos in it requires a label stating that it contains asbestos! similarly, a Roman lamp in your local museum, which may have had an asbestos wick in it (Oh yes they did), also requires a label to be attached to it if you cannot prove that it didn't. How will the public react to that do you think?
That is only the tip of a very expensive iceberg. Or should we adopt the member states approach to regulation? I am practicing my Gallic shrug as I write.

REACH and CLP are direct "regulation" from EU, they are not directives and GB was a party to its passage through all stages. Therefore, short of leaving the EU, you cannot get rid of REACH /CLP.


Secondly, if you read the fine print in Appendix 7, ".....The labelling may be dispensed with if smallness of size or unsuitability of packaging make it impossible for a label to be affixed to the component"

I would not believe everything that has been sensationalised in the media regarding REACH.