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Thompsons Solicitors for The Legal Line - Case History
3. Personal Injury – Campaigns and Test Cases
Deafness
Before the 1970s, compensation for noise-induced hearing loss was almost unknown. Towards the end of the decade, however, an increasing number of cases were being put forward. Mostly these were from workers in engineering, shipbuilding and similar industries and primarily through their unions. Thompsons dealt with a great many of these personal injury cases. Some were selected to proceed as test cases in 1983:
Thompsons and Others v Smiths Shiprepairs (North Shields) Ltd (1984): These test cases involved men who had worked in shipbuilding or repair from the 1940s to 1970s. They were successful as the judge found that a reasonable employer would have provided hearing protection from 1963, when a guideline booklet, Noise and the Worker, was produced by the Factory Inspectorate.
They were all entitled to injury compensation, based on the proportion of the damage caused to their hearing that occurred after 1963.
After this judgement, many thousands of cases were able to be brought by workers under a compensation scheme agreed between most of the unions and major insurers. The scheme continued into the 1990s and the Noise at Work Regulations 1989 came into force to improve employers’ safety performance.
Welders Lung
The GMB union referred a number of cases to Thompsons in the 1980s in respect of former shipyard workers, mostly from Merseyside, with a range of respiratory diseases believed to be caused at least partly by welding fumes. The success of the test cases brought by Thompsons enabled many more claimants to secure damages.
Knox and Ors v Cammell Laird Shipbuilders Ltd (1990): These were industrial disease test cases involving several of the welders. The employers were found to be at fault and ordered to pay damages as, by 1951, they should have realised the risk to their employees and implemented protective measures. Compensation was awarded to those that worked in confined spaces with dense fumes, however some received reduced amounts due to smoking.
Passive Smoking
Bland v Stockport MBC (settlement 1993): This case gave a boost to Thompsons’s long held campaign regarding passive smoking. It resulted in an out-of-court settlement and was handled by Thompsons.
Mrs Bland was employed in a large, open plan office by the council from 1979. Smoking was allowed until 1990. There was little ventilation which caused Mrs Bland to be exposed to large amounts of cigarette smoke. She developed coughs, catarrh and sore throats, which persisted until the smoking ban in the office, after which there was some improvement. The case settled in the sum of £15,000.
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