David Cameron, The Conservatives and The Insurance Industry
So our Prime Minister has promised to take on the “’health and safety culture.” In an article in the London Evening Standard on the 5th January 2011 he maintains that businesses have to settle cases where an injured employee has a weak case to avoid excessive legal fees. He says he is therefore going to cap legal fees. He also intends to change the law to ensure businesses are no longer considered automatically at fault if something goes wrong and someone is injured. Leaving aside the fact that when someone is injured at work it is usually the fault of the employer because quite plainly and simply they have been negligent, what is this law that says they are “automatically” to blame? I suspect he doesn’t know because there isn’t one. What he actually means to say is that he wants to make it more difficult to claim compensation for accidents at work. Going back to the legal fees point, where is the evidence that businesses settle weak cases because of legal fees? I don’t see it in our cases when acting for clients injured at work, and I fancy I have seen a lot more work accident claims than Mr Cameron.
The real agenda behind this in my view is the role of insurance in these claims. I cannot think of any claim which we have been involved in where compensation and legal fees are actually paid by businesses. Employers must take out insurance in case they injury their workforce, so let’s be honest – it’s the insurance industry who are doing the paying out. When was the last time you knew of an insurer meekly paying over money because they didn’t fancy a fight? Come on Mr C, be honest with us.
So why do the Tories always seem to be so desperate to save the insurance industry a few bob at the expense of genuinely injured people? Could it have anything to do with the fact that financial firms with insurance interests have donated £5.4m to the Conservative Party in the last decade, £4.9m of that since David Cameron became leader in December 2005?
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