Miners' health damages could cost government pounds 3.6bn

The Government is facing a total compensation bill of over pounds 3.5bn to miners whose health was wrecked by working down the pits, it emerged yesterday.

Six miners fighting a high court test case seeking compensation for a variety of debilitating illnesses caused by their work underground were awarded an average of pounds 18,000 damages each yesterday.

If this figure was carried through to the estimated 200,000 miners, former miners or their widows expected to make claims, according to government figures, the final sum will be around pounds 3.6bn.

Mr Justice Turner found on 23 January that British Coal, the defunct nationalised industry now under government administration, was negligent in the operation of its mines.

Yesterday he settled the final claims for the six men who suffered chronic ill health from inhaling coal dust, and also ruled that Cordelia Wells, widow of one of the six miners, Samuel, should receive the full statutory bereavement damages of pounds 7,500.

Lawyers for British Coal had tried to argue that because Mr Wells's damages for ill health were halved because the judge ruled that smoking was half to blame for his chronic emphysema, the bereavement award should also be halved.

The judge ruled, however, that Mrs Wells should receive the full amount, allowing hundreds of other widows to make the same claim whether or not their deaths may have been partly attributable to smoking.

The largest damages sum of pounds 32,500 went to Mrs Wells of Maesteg, south Wales. The other sums ranged from pounds 25,000 down to pounds 5,200, making a total of pounds 110,000.

Mr Justice Turner gave lawyers for the Government 28 days to come up with a scheme to administer and settle all outstanding claims which must be made within six months of his judgment in January.

He also imposed a punitive scale of legal costs on the Government for part of the year-long litigation for trying to argue that coal dust was not a cause of bronchitis or emphysema, against the findings of its own medical reports.