Awards add insult to injury

Mar 18 2008 by Denise Robertson, Western Mail

LAST WEEK a Radio 4 documentary told how new ways of deciding compensation for men and women wounded in action is causing disquiet in the Armed Services.

Once upon a time the level of disability was decided by doctors. Now it’s apparently decided by laymen at unbelievably low levels, levels that would never be tolerated in a civil court.

One example was of a young soldier wounded so seriously he cannot use his limbs, needs help with feeding and is so altered in his personality that, in the words of his 25-year-old wife, “I feel my husband never came back from Iraq”. When he comes home she will have to combine giving him full care alongside caring for her two-year-old child.

His award was £114,000.

The youngest soldier to be injured received £57,587 for loss of a leg, a hand and internal injuries.

Two days later I read of a woman lawyer awarded £13m because “bullying” at work had turned her into a nervous wreck and a nurse awarded £300,000 because she was allergic to the latex gloves she had worn at work. A civil servant in the MoD got £202,000 for back strain and another £217,000 for chronic fatigue syndrome and depression.

I have no way of knowing whether or not these awards were justified. I have not seen the evidence. But I know the awards to seriously wounded soldiers are pitifully inadequate.

The MoD says wounded servicemen and women get lifelong benefits in addition but a pension eked out over the years will not help them now as they adjust to the fact that their lives can never be the same again.

In an ideal world Mr Cameron, but…

PROMISES are easy. Fulfilling them is not.

David Cameron wants fathers and mothers to be allowed to take more than six months paid maternity leave, together if they choose. The proposals would introduce “flexible parental leave” allowing parents to have up to a year off between them following the birth of a child.

I couldn’t agree more. In an ideal world it’s a lovely idea.

Labour is already bringing in new maternity plans that extend leave to 52 weeks and make it more flexible so that fathers could also take time off and I’m all for that too, in an ideal world.

And that pay has to come from somewhere, either out of sometimes struggling businesses or from the taxpayer

Last week I listened to desperate parents whose disabled children need full time care. Mr Cameron has such a child so he knows what that means. There was little help for them. One mother, whose child never sleeps through the night, gets one night’s respite care a month. Another, desperate for help with her difficult almost-adult son, asked, “If I killed myself would someone take notice?”

When we can fund those children, Mr Cameron, and give sight-saving drugs to pensioners without them having first to go blind in one eye, I’ll pay taxes for flexibility and choice. I too want to get things right for the future, Mr Cameron, but I want to sort the present out first.

Human suffering is too high a price to pay for coal

THE first recruitment drive for experienced coal miners in almost a quarter of a century is being launched.

The UK’s largest colliery, Daw Mill, already employs 600 staff and needs skilled workers to expand production.

Bosses at Arley, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, are hunting former colliers to increase domestic production to vie with imported coal, which has more than doubled in price.

This will come as a surprise to many people who thought mining was well and truly dead.

I remember the warmth, the courage, humour and stoicism of the mining community into which I moved in the 1960s, where each day at work could spell danger, even death in the pit.

In the busy accident hospital where I worked as a teenager, the door swung open every five minutes to admit a miner, minus a finger or a limb but still smiling and begging me to ignore the no- smoking notices and light them a fag. They worked below ground and were truly the salt of the earth, but the price of coal in human terms was a heavy one.

They say the new mining work will be very different. I hope that’s true.

A regeneration of the mining industry must not again be at the expense of the men who work in it. That is too high a price to pay for coal.