Thompsons Solicitors has stepped up its campaign for an Employer’s Liability Insurance Bureau in personal injury cases. Thousands of asbestos victims across the UK receive no compensation from employers who caused their illness because the company has ceased trading and an insurer cannot be traced.
While the failure of some employers to obtain insurance is a problem, an even bigger problem is that, although employers’ liability insurance has been compulsory since 1972, there was no requirement for employers or insurers to keep records until 1999. Nor is there a central record of historical employers’ insurance policies.
The problem is compounded by the fact that increasingly asbestos claims are for people who worked for smaller employers. The insurers of employers in the shipbuilding, heavy engineering and manufacturing industry are usually well known or easier to trace than firms that may only have traded for a short time and for which there may be no records.
Thompsons believes the answer is the establishment of an insurance fund of last resort for employer liability claims where the employer no longer exists and was either uninsured or the insurer cannot be traced. Such a fund would be administered by an Employers Liability Insurance Bureau (ELIB).
An ELIB would ensure that people injured through the fault of an employer would receive compensation if the employer is either defunct and uninsured or insurers cannot be traced. It would pay out to around one in 10 mesothelioma sufferers or their families whose claims currently fail.
Thompsons’ call for a fund comes after a recent review of the Association of British Insurers (ABI) voluntary tracing scheme confirmed what Thompsons has long said was the case – it isn’t working. Just 41 per cent of enquiries to the scheme were successful with more than 7,000 enquiries failing to trace an insurer.