18 - Accident compensation in the twenty-first century

Summary

Where we are now and how we got here

Serious dissatisfaction with the operation of the tort system, as a mechanism of compensating for personal injury and death, first received widespread expression in the late 1960s. Terence Ison's book, The Forensic Lottery, was published in 1967, followed by D.W. Elliot and H. Street's Road Accidents in 1968, and the first edition of this book in 1970. At about the same time, the famous Thalidomide affair was coming to a head. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a large number of children around the world were born with disabilities of varying degrees of severity as a result of their mothers'having taken the drug Thalidomide during pregnancy. Tort actions mounted against manufacturers of the drug came to the attention of the public in 1972 when The Sunday Times ran a series of articles in which one of the manufacturers, the Distillers Company, was heavily criticised for the way in which it was defending the actions. As a result, the proprietors of The Sunday Times were prosecuted for contempt of court, and the case eventually found its way to the European Court of Human Rights. By the early 1970s, then, there was a vigorous public debate in the UK about the shortcomings of the tort system as a compensation mechanism. Fuel was added to this debate by the enactment in New Zealand in 1972 of a general accident compensation scheme.