Your rights include compensation for the injury itself and loss of income

20 June 2011. There were more than 120,000 serious accidents at work last year leading to either a major injury or the victim having to take more than 3 days off work. At a rate of 840 reportable injuries for every 100,000 workers, this led to a total of 5.1 million work days lost due to injury (Source: Health and Safety Executive 2009-10).

Whilst both the rate of accidents and the number of working days lost has declined since the turn of the century, there are still a regrettable number of accidents that could have been avoided - 15,881 enforcement notices were issued last year for breaches of health and safety legislation, leading to a total of £13.7m in fines.

Some accidents are just an unfortunate sequence of events with no-one at fault. Others are due to negligence – whether on the part of the employer or due to the carelessness of a co-worker. If you are hurt in an accident at work and believe strongly that someone is to blame, then what should you do? Do you go back to work (once you have recovered) and carry on as if nothing had happened? Or do you take action to claim compensation for your injury and try to ensure that the causes of the accident are removed so it does not happen to anyone else?

When the accident occurs, your first priority is obviously to ensure that you are safe and your injury is treated as soon as possible. You should then do two things as soon as possible – take note of the circumstances of the accident and obtain the names and details of any witnesses. In one case where our client was injured due to the uneven surface in the warehouse, her employer had the floor repaired immediately after to deny responsibility. Fortunately one of her colleagues had taken a photo of the floor before it was repaired – most mobile phones now have camera facilities.

According to RIDDOR 95 (The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995), serious accidents at work must be reported to the authorities:
 

• Fatal and serious injuries

• Injuries leading to an absence from work or the inability to do their job for more than 3 days

The official report will probably be referred to by your solicitor should you eventually decide to make a claim.

This brings us on to a dilemma facing many of our clients – should they sue their own employer? People are often worried to take action against their employers, but you have specific rights in case of accidents, not least that your employer is not allowed to dismiss you for making a claim.

If you work for a small firm then you may be worried that a large compensation payout would put them out of business – in fact, this and your solicitor’s fees are paid by their employers’ liability insurance (all employers must have this by law).

If successful this would not just provide you with financial support for coping with your injury, it could help prevent similar accidents from happening to other people. The financial support may allow you to take more time off work to recover from your injury – should you rush back to work before you are fully recovered, this may actually have implications for your overall health.

If you are decided that you want to make a claim, who should you use to make this claim? Pick up most newspapers and magazines, or Google ‘accident compensation’ and you are inundated by adverts for accident specialist solicitors and claims management companies.

Accident claims generally do not cost you anything to make, as they are run on a ‘no win no fee’ basis. This is a common term in English legal terminology but can be misleading because it implies that if you win there is a fee to be paid – in fact, if you win, then the solicitor claims their fee from your employer so you still have nothing to pay. If you don’t win then the solicitor recovers their costs and fees from legal expenses insurance.

Because of this, there is no reason not to use a claims management company – some people fear that this will cost them more, but as we have just seen, accident compensation claims should not cost you anything, whether you use a solicitor directly or a claims management company.

A good claims management company will have several solicitors on its panel. This means that if your claim is not accepted by the first solicitor they refer it to, then they can try with several more – all without any further effort required on our part. This can be important because all solicitors have different criteria by which they accept accident claims.

If using a claims management company however, you should check that they are registered with the Ministry of Justice. This is a legal requirement, and if they are not registered but still advertising for claims then this is a serious breach of the law – do you really want your claim handled by a ‘legal’ firm that has so little regard for the law? At the least, it means their standards elsewhere will be questionable, and your claim is more likely to fail, or secure you less compensation than would have been possible with a reputable firm.

A registered firm must display its registration number on its website, and it starts with “CRM”. As a further check, you should go to the Ministry of Justice website - www.claimsregulation.gov.uk – and enter the CRM number, to see if the listed company is indeed the one using that number on their website.

Two questions that nearly every client asks us are: how long will it take and how much could I receive? Unfortunately these are almost impossible to answer in broad terms. Every case is unique, and indeed most solicitors refuse to even ‘guess’ before they have assessed your case. If the guess turns out to be much different from the reality, then they may even be sued for professional negligence – for example clients make plans according to how much compensation they think they will get.

Many websites for accident specialists will give ranges of possible compensation amounts, depending on the part of the body. These are usually taken from the ‘JSB Guidelines’ (Judicial Studies Board Guidelines) but they are exactly that, no more than guidelines.

However, whilst we are unable to give an amount in this article, we can tell you that your rights include compensation for the injury itself, for loss of income, for treatment fees (including the cost of travelling for your treatment), and even property damage, for example to your clothes.

For detailed information and advice about your injury and the details of your claim, it is always best to contact specialists in this area, so then they can fully advise in your particular case.