Industry news roundup: week ended 21 Oct 2013:
Is it just me or does it seem like people don’t even hesitate to bring an accident claim for even the most minor of injuries?
I mean, you read about it every day: so-and-so gets thousands or even millions in personal injury compensation because they slipped on some pavement and skinned their knees. I’m not even making this up, either – in fact just this week a new report emerged how Derbyshire County Council has paid out more than £400,000 in damages since 2010.
It’s not just a few hundred quid here and there either – there are some serious compensation awards being tossed about. In fact one pupil earned a £40,000 payout after he suffered injuries on a trip with his secondary school. There were plenty of other big-ticket responses as well, such as the £25,000 reward one teen was given after being the victim of bullying or the £23,710 another teen earned after he was struck with a foreign object.
Of course that’s not even the worst part. If we turn our gaze away from Derbyshire and instead turn our attention to North Somerset, we quickly learn that the last five years have seen more than £3 million worth of compensation claims, with the local authority paying out on more than half of them.
So what kind of terrible injuries are costing North Somerset Council so much dosh? Well how about a loose kerb causing hysterectomy stitches to burst? If that’s a bit too graphic for you, apparently one of the local authority’s big problems happened to be a pair of trousers that had been damaged by some spilled bleach.
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the world has officially gone mad. I know that I’m supposed to say that there’s no such thing as the so-called ‘compensation culture,’ but it seems rather difficult to say that with a straight face when some bleach-spilled trousers and other spurious personal injury claims are costing one local authority millions of pounds. I’m not saying that accident’s don’t happen, mind you – they do, and sometimes they can be rather injurious – but for pity’s sake, just go down and buy yourself a new pair of trousers if you spill some bleach on them! You don’t need to try to bilk your local council out of thousands of pounds on such a frivolous and completely spurious venture.