Lord Young’s report ‘Common Sense, Common Safety’ promotes a series of recommendations for improving the stance of health and safety. Lord Young’s report allegedly ensures that health and safety is taken critically by employers and the general public, while ensuring the burden on small business is as trivial as possible. Further to this, Lord Young’s emphasis is on the ‘Compensation Culture’ that he believes has occurred through the heavily criticized media.

Young’s recommendations include:

• Examining the option of extending the RTA scheme upper limit to £25,000.

• Introducing a simplified claims procedure for personal injury claims on a fixed cost basis.

• Restrict the way in which referral agencies and personal injury lawyers operate with restrictions on advertising.

The aim of Lord Young is to simplify the claims procedure, condense the time taken to agree damages and to reduce costs. There is no real detail or explanation in Lord Young’s report as to how this would be achieved by comparison one can remember the difficulties that Lord Justice Jackson encountered when trying to attain a consensus on the problems of costs between claimant and defendant bodies. It is absurd that no framework has been set out in his report as to how Lord Young aims to put into practice such proposals. Overall, Lord Young seems to give the impression of ‘watch this space’.

Lord Young states ‘the general impression created is that, no matter how trivial or unsubstantiated a claim for damages may be, there is a firm of lawyers ready and waiting to pursue it.’ It is understandable that there will be a firm of lawyers ready to pursue the claim as after all that is what lawyers do; provide legal representation to those who claim to have been injured, as a result of negligence or wrongdoing.

It is rather absurd for Lord Young to then go on further to say ‘lawyers are only too willing to pounce with a claim for damages on the slightest pretext.’ Does he find Personal Injury lawyers to be ominous? Is it erroneous for me to say, Personal Injury lawyers get a sense of fulfillment when they attain damages for a well deserved claimant? I think not. Is it immoral when they get paid merely if the claim is successful? This clearly indicates that Personal Injury lawyers work in the best interest of their clients and should not be labeled as villains as portrayed by Lord Young.

The suggestion that we are living in a ‘compensation culture’ arises problems with Lord Young’s report. Is it wrong for the public to claim for something that is rightly theirs? There is no such thing as a ‘compensation culture’; it is a myth that is ‘fueled by perception’. From the stakeholders that Lord Young consulted, the majority indicated that they did not think there was a growing compensation culture in Britain. This seems to contradict the philosophy adopted by Lord Young’s idea of ‘compensation culture’. Is it really a bad thing making businesses ‘over-cautious’ with regards to health and safety? Surely, it is a good thing adopting high standards of health and safety.

What is more, the government no longer provides legal aid for personal injury claimants and does not spend any money promoting the services. So how else are innocent accident victims supposed to know how to claim compensation? It is up to Personal Injury firms to inform people of their rights since the government does not, otherwise they would ultimately be left in the dark.

This government must take the lead in stopping misplaced panic about the compensation system. The proposals for the extension of RTA-type schemes if put into practice may well change the legal landscape for low value personal injury claims; both reducing costs and making them more predictable for the vast majority of personal injury claims. It is unfortunate that no framework has been set out in Lord Young’s report as to how he intends to implement his proposals. Much of his report lacks a suitable agenda going forward and we are left with a series of statements and suggestions without any indication of when or how the proposals might be implemented. It seems to be a question of ‘watch this space’…