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The Personal Injury & Accident Compensation Claim Specialists
Yet the fact remains that the number of personal injury cases has plummeted. Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, knows it. A year ago, he was pooh-poohing the stories about thieving opportunists bringing British business to its knees.
His line changed in the autumn. The media had created the false 'perception' of a compensation culture, he said, and the government must act to combat this phantom menace.
This makes no sense at all. His lordship is in the ridiculous position of a man who assures his wife he's not having an affair by promising to give up his mistress. He is determined to tackle a problem that doesn't exist, and the sly way the insurance industry wants him to do it is going to put many injured people at a huge disadvantage.
The Association of British Insurers is calling for lawyers to be pushed out of 90 per cent of personal-injuries cases. Not their own lawyers, mind you - they will still be working to batter claims down - but the claimants' solicitors. When they are gone, the insurers promise us a new system in the mould of the Child Support Agency with fixed tariffs for injuries.
The problem is that insurers cause most of the delays. They prolong cases in the hope people will give up and settle for less than they are entitled to. They also know that the more unresolved claims there are the higher the premium they can charge employers.
Tom Jones, from trade union law firm Thompsons, tells me he has never had a client the insurers haven't tried to stitch up. He doesn't blame them - it's their duty to hang on to as much money as possible - but he is genuinely worried that honourable solicitors who have fought on behalf of men coughing up their guts because of asbestosis are going to be put out of business by a Labour government.
The battle of Wapping may be a 20th-century curiosity, but do not think for a moment that very highly paid men and women aren't still striving to ensure that big boys always outmanoeuvre the little people.
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Stories about our compensation culture are tosh peddled by insurers
The following correction was printed in the Observer's On the record column, Sunday February 5 2006. This article referred to a case involving a Mersey-side firefighter. We claimed the fire service turned down an opportunity to settle the case for £40,000 and that insurers 'dragged out the case' to the Court of Appeal. However, the figure sought was £400,000 and the decision to defend the case was based on legal advice, not insurance considerations. .
Last week was the 20th anniversary of the Wapping dispute and, although the Eighties weren't so long ago, the pictures of pickets taking on a management which had outmanoeuvred them feel as if they're from another age. After the collapse of robust trade unionism, employees don't fight in the streets any more but in the courts, the last arena where they can meet business on equal terms. Across the developed world, many powerful people don't like them fighting at all and are trying to load the law against them.
Throughout his career, George W Bush has campaigned for 'tort reform,' a euphemism for making it harder for the sick and put-upon to claim damages. Britain is going the same way. In the Eighties, business persuaded the Thatcher government to make it ever more difficult for employees to strike. Mission accomplished, it is now pushing the Blair government to make it ever more difficult for employees to sue.
Ministers held the latest in a series of meetings last Friday about how to tackle 'the compensation culture'. Much of their discussion may well have been sensible; we already know they want to get ambulance-chasing solicitors out of hospitals and allow teachers to take pupils on school trips without brokering a deal at Lloyds.
But the real pressure ministers are bending before doesn't come from schools and hospitals but from the insurance industry which wants to stop claims for compensation for personal injuries at work reaching the courts. The strange thing is that it can't produce a shred of evidence to support its allegation that American-style sharp practice is rife in Britain.
Check out the stories about grasping workers milking the system that take up so much space in the media and nine times out of 10 you will find they're tosh. For instance, there was a fuss last month about Gavin Bassie, a fireman who was invalided out of the service after slipping on a dusty floor during a PE session.
The Merseyside Fire Authority had to pay £100,000 in compensation for his badly torn knee ligaments and a similar amount in costs. After the hearing, managers said the spectre of litigation was now so chilling it had forced them to ban officers from running in fitness classes.
It sounded an outrageous state of affairs until you learned that Bassie originally offered to settle for £40,000, not a huge sum for a man whose career was over. The insurers dragged out the case and the Court of Appeal punished them for it. All the judges asked the authority to do was to make sure the floors were swept. Bassie's employers diverted attention from a humiliating defeat by shouting that political correctness had gone mad - yet again - and pretending that the law was making them end essential fitness training.
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