By Lee Rotherham
This week the political roadshow is motoring forwards on the economy. In this, it will be preceded by both the metaphorical and very real juggernaut of the national debt, though it’s far from certain if any of the candidates will become roadkill as a result.
But there is more at play than the capability of future governments to balance the books or simply to count straight.
Since first becoming involved in excavating the spending realities underlying the Bumper Books of Government Waste, I’ve kept half an eye on how some of the major themes emerging from that research have developed – and not just the strange material such as what happened to Berlusconi’s Downing Street gold. It was therefore a pleasant sight to find the Sunday Telegraph recently covering what forms, along with your standard red tape, a not insignificant cause of economic drag – the country’s steadily emerging compensation culture.
The Sunday Telegraph’s article focused purely on payouts to tourists visiting sites, but provides a very timely reminder of a problem that has expanded beyond reason or common sense. Of course it’s fair enough to indemnify cases where shoddy workmanship or downright negligence have caused injuries. But there comes a point where you cannot legislate for the inattentiveness and yes, stupidity of the individual.
To add to the nanny state we have been developing a nanny economy, driven not even by the civil courts themselves but by the very fear of them, shepherded by no-win no-fee ambulance chasing. This of course means higher prices for the consumer - someone has to pay the insurance companies - and higher costs to the taxpayer when councils, for instance, are concerned.
So I hope that tomorrow night the party leaders will address this insidious creeping tariff on common sense. The cost is not always paid up front. We are obsessing with avoiding the risks of the courts, rather than avoiding (such as you can) the injuries themselves.
The politicians should certainly be able to speak from experience. You can see from both sides of a lately rediscovered flyer from my archives pictured below (click to enlarge) that the House of Commons itself has not been immune from the consequences of the resulting industrial-scale obsession with health and safety.
But then there is the example of what happens in Number 10 itself. As a result of an FOI request to the Cabinet Office, we know that from the day Gordon Brown became PM up to 1st March of this year, 23 accidents were reported. 14 people “slipped, tripped or fell”; 2 accidents are down as “ill health”; 2 people were injured while carrying a load; 2 people were scalded; 1 person was injured while opening a door; 1 person was injured by a sharp object; and 1 person “struck a fixed or stationary object”. Five people needed on-site first aid, and two people had to go to hospital.
OK, obvious jokes about clunking fists and nokias aside, the point is that in the Cabinet Office no one claimed compensation. Is that a pointer to a difference in work ethic, or about the management style in play? Is it just a Downing Street bubble that exists because the workplace is too high profile? No-one seems to have claimed for twisted arms, though no one seems to have complained at senior staff being exempted from working time limits either.
£5,000 of new national debt is being added every second. That surely is worth top billing tomorrow. Red tape and the Euro are worth discussing also. But so too surely is a problem that takes up a sizeable chunk of the £10 billion compensation economy each year, and looks set to just get worse over time.
