New legal service for Londoners. 'Angels of light' needed to bring justice to London - Nina Bawden

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The Law Society on 8 September 2004 heard that there was an urgent need to the replace 'cold and mean spirited' attitude to citizens' rights.

Londoners suffering personal injury must look for 'angels of light' to help them in their search for justice, according to novelist and safety campaigner Nina Bawden, who was severely injured and lost her husband in the Potters Bar rail crash.
She was speaking at the Law Society launch of London Accident Link, a non-profit making organisation set up to bring specialist personal injury advice to every part of London.
Nina Bawden was discussing claims by some politicians and newspapers that there is a 'compensation culture' in this country which encourages spurious claims for injury.
'In my smug and ignorant days before the train crash I might even believed in the existence of a compensation culture myself,' she told Mary Hassell. 'But that was before I had encountered our faceless and unimaginative corporate culture and the mean spirited attitude of the Government towards such events.
'The people of London need to find themselves an 'angel of light' when they find themselves injured and at the mercy of this kind of faceless culture. You must fight for the people of London and be their angel, to help them to the justice they deserve.'
Later Nina Bawden's solicitor Louise Christian, who also represents other train crash victims as well as prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, claimed that in this country: 'We don't have a compensation culture, we have a no- compensation culture.'
London Accident Link is an organisation of 24 leading firms of London lawyers, set up to offer local expertise to those with a claim for injury. The move is intended to fight the idea of the compensation culture and follows recent well publicized public concern about victims of accidents who have been poorly advised by unscrupulous claims companies.
A recent Cabinet office report dismissed the idea of a compensation culture as an 'urban myth'. After taking evidence from dozens of independent witnesses, they concluded that the idea is largely the invention of parts of the national news media.
The Government's own statistics show that the British public is tending to claim less, not more, for accidents in which they suffer injury.
In the past year, public liability claims have fallen by 17%, employment liability by 15%, motor claims by 6% and clinical negligence, involving claims against hospitals, by 11%. In fact, 99% of those injured in medical accidents do not claim.

Note to editors
The report of the Government task force on the compensation culture can be found at: www.brtf.gov.uk