Mr. Dave Anderson (Blaydon): I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this timely debate. He mentions the amount of money that has already been spent on litigation. May I suggest that the company that is doing the work for the Government is the same one that cost them £10 million in respect of chest diseases and more than £3.5 million in respect of vibration white finger, both of which cases were roundly defeated, yet the Government are still taking advice from those people? Their track record is 2-0 and looks likely to become 3-0. If we can come up with a scheme, it will help not only the miners, but the Government.
Mr. Michael Clapham (Barnsley, West and Penistone) (Lab): I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, and I have no doubt that the Minister has taken it on board. As he knows, the COPD scheme came into being and started to be constructed following a High Court action in 1998. Here we are, 12 years after it began to be implemented, yet we have not made all the payments to claimants under the scheme. That gives an idea of how long it can take to deal with compensation. With the likely knee litigation, we do not have that time. That is the real reason why we need to look at implementation of a statutory no-fault liability scheme.
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Mr. Dave Anderson (Blaydon): The Minister will not be surprised that I am disappointed by what he has said so far. It is not just about the costs of litigation. What about the impacts on the public purse? He mentioned reports from the NAO. The Legal Services Commission has also done a massive amount of work. There has been a huge cost to the public purse in addition to the legal implications the Minister has advanced, including payments to solicitors and barristers. That must surely be weighed in the balance against the sensible scheme advanced by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr. David Kidney): I understand that point. My hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone mentioned the costs and the amount that we have paid to lawyers already for litigation on osteoarthritis of the knee. He is right. We have had to pay lawyers, particularly for document disclosure. He knows that disclosure is an important part of the process of establishing whether there is liability.
One key lesson learned by the Department in conducting the litigation is that we must understand the scale of potential claims for the compensation. Our estimates in the past for VWF and COPD were much lower than the amounts that were subsequently paid. My hon. Friend mentioned on a number of occasions some 10,000 claims for osteoarthritis of the knee. So far, under the group litigation order, there are about 900 claimants, and the claimants' lawyers have mentioned to us another 1,000 claims. Putting the matter in a broader context, we handled more than 170,000 claims under the VWF scheme and more than 590,000 for COPD. Collectively, that totals more than 750,000 claims.
The full debate may be read here.
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