Chris.

This goes right to the heart of “Compensation Culture” and the dangers of Conditional Fee Arrangements (CFA) - better known as “no win no fee”.  Frankly I now believe that CFAs represent a nice little earner for the legal profession which now has developed all manner of self serving restrictive practices off the back of it. The spectator may have got nothing but his solicitor, his barrister, the judge, our barrister will all have ensured they were paid for their contributions.

The underlying legislation is not recent - namely the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957, which in turn is built upon a Common Law principle. The relevant clause is in 2.2 :

This is the legislation that allows people to sue for slips and falls. In this particular case a visiting spectator at one of our games was injured when a legal tackle involving several players slid off the pitch. This led to a very severe knee injury, the visitor was left in hospital over Christmas, has had extensive medical treatment and risks non trivial degeneration of his knee as he gets older. The spectator used one of those solicitors that advertises endlessly on daytime television, which resulted in me getting a writ.

I suspect that the spectator was mystified why I defended the case so strongly. After all he had a bad accident, he was out of pocket, there was an insurance company that could be made to pay up. But the point is that insurance is not free, the money directly and indirectly comes out of an amateur sport, and at some point the insurers would want to limit their risk by changing the sport in ways which come back to adversely affect unpaid volunteers like me.

Now luckily I was backed by the RFU’s insurers. Our barrister was Claire Lindsay and she was excellent. My direct out of pocket expenses will be covered, but the time I have spent on this case over three years will not be, in a sense it is literally priceless. I guess I have spent about 80 to 100 hours of my life handling this claim over 3 years – equivalent to a short holiday. I suspect that I will have to give that time up without compensation. I am not easily stressed, but I have lost sleep on this one.

My rugby club is one of the smallest (but definitely the proudest) rugby clubs in England. It’s the furthest flung club from Twickenham. We normally have twice as many players as spectators at our grounds, we do all we can reasonably do to prevent unnecessary accidents. Yet I and a number of other people have had to slog through this case for years, pointlessly, in order to keep the legal industry happy.

The judge, in his verdict, was completely clear that this case was bound to fail. I had done a risk assessment before the incident, we take particular measures on the rare days that there is a big crowd, we followed the various best practices that exist. In other words I had taken reasonable care.  The judge also pointed out that if the claim had been allowed the implications would affect every rugby club in the country and indeed other sports (he specifically mention football and hockey).

I did speak to a friend about this case – he is a barrister working in another sphere. He defended the CFA arrangements since in practice everyone caught up with this is insured. Indeed the very first inkling I had about this case was when I got a phone call enquiring whether we were covered by insurance. I suspect that if we had not been insured then the case would not have gone ahead since without that the risk equation (to the solicitors) would slide in the wrong direction. But that “well it’s all down to the insurers” is just plain wrong. Yes they pick up the tab, but they need help to deal with the mountain of evidence (114 pages in this case) and that comes from those of us at the coal face.

In my opinion CFA should be scrapped completely. Claims under £50,000 should be handled by county courts, which means that 95% of claims will lose 95% of legal fees, since broadly speaking county courts won’t award costs. That would result in an element of rough justice due to the complexities of medical claims in particular but in justified cases access to justice would actually be improved on both sides.

Some alternative arrangement would be needed for the more serious cases, which indeed could be modelled on CFA, but there is one other restrictive practice that needs to end: if a judge holds that a claimant is (for example) 30% responsible for an accident, his or her compensation will be adjusted downwards accordingly. This happens a lot, and recognises the complexities of life. But in that situation the legal industry will still get 100% of their fee. In fact may end up with more than 100%. That is both unfair and self serving.

One of the few odd moments in our Hexham campaign was a young lad, with presumably Liberal Democrat inclinations, getting very cross with us in Fore Street. “It’s an oxymoron,” he claimed, in respect of our slogan ‘Vote For Change’. Not sure how he feels today! Here’s my guess.

The new coalition agreement strikes me as a genuine attempt to build a document which represents the electorate’s composite view, as opposed to jettisoning or LCD’ing (lowest common denominator).  The outcome is fairly close to my personal politics, though I have some concerns (e.g. the triple lock on pensions giving a minimum 2.5% increase – marvellous, but what if we have poor growth and low inflation for a while? Generous commitments like that are nearly impossible to reverse and risk being paid for off the back of private sector wage deflation). But this is not the time to carp, oddly enough it truly was a case of “Vote For Change”.

Well Hexham has its own count to do, just about the last one in the UK to be declared. We assemble to act as count agents, checking up on the Returning Officer’s staff. There are two stages – verification and the count. Both of these have two sub stages. Firstly the postal ballots get verified (to ensure what went into the ballot box was what came out), then the polling station votes. From this I see we have won comfortably in Hexham. The second stage consists of assembling the ballots into piles for each candidates, then clipping each pile into groups of 50 ballots. It is easy to make a mistake, I spotted 16 errors at this stage, so I kept raising my arm to get the supervisor over. The clipped ballots then get put into a set of wooden troughs and it’s immediately obvious how well we are doing.

The result was declared just after 2 pm:

Guy Opperman –  Conservative, 18,795 votes, 43.2% + 0.8 percent points
Andrew Duffield – Liberal Democrat,  13,007, 29.9%  +4.2 
Antoine Tinnion - Labour, 8,253, 19.0% -11.4
Steve Ford – Independent, 1,974, 4.5% +4.5
Quentin Hawkins – British National Party, 1,205, 2.8% +2.8
Colin Moss – Independent, 249, 0.6% +0.6

So we increased our total vote, our majority and our share of the vote, which with a new candidate is as good as it gets. Guy makes a gracious acceptance speech, which is more than be said for some of his opponents. It was also an occasion to meet up with the other candidates, with whom we’ve generally had good relations.

After the declaration we head to Bev’s house for a celebration drink, but we’re so exhausted that it did not turn into a marathon session, thankfully! And further good news from Berwick, where Anne-Marie Trevelyan has given Sir Alan Beith a real fright, along with one of the biggest swings in the country.

Afterwards I head straight to Percy Park Rugby Club. I know this place very well, having played on all three pitches there in recent years, but today it is Wendy Morton’s campaign centre. I help Wendy get the tables lined up by electoral division and shortly after 8 am we are ready to roll. What a day! Jon and JonJo had two Merlin screens rigged up and throughout the day we were sent out to knockup voters. In other words, trying to jolly our supporters to get out there and vote for us. I was particularly buoyed up by my second set of print-outs. I must have annoyed JonJo since he gave me a huge list to keep me quiet, but almost all in one street in Monkseaton. Must be a big street I thought. It wasn’t, it was just a case that almost every house was listed as Conservative voter or potential voter. Has someone been over optimistic in compiling the canvass? Nope, every house I went to was solidly Conservative. One lady danced a gig on the doorstep when I asked her if she had voted yet.

It was a long day, I arrived before 8 am and my last task was to take a voter with a foot injury to the polling station just before it closed, in one of the poorest areas in the constituency. Her son said hello afterwards, at 17 years old he was a few months too young to vote but he was a Tory too.

My JonJo paranoia is increased when he sets me up on a knock-up patrol with two Conservative Future chairmen, I am not exactly used to running at that pace!

I got home just before Sunderland three sets of votes came in. Houghton le Spring and Washington results were very promising – big swings to us. Then the first shock. Sunderland Central stayed Labour. I had a bad feeling about how things were going. But I also knew that I had to be bright eyed on Friday since I was one of Hexham count agents. So I went off to bed at 3 am……

For Bank Holiday Monday we decided not to knock on doors until after lunch. I leafleted Prudhoe earlier in the morning, then seven of us leafleted Hexham’s Priestland area, tripping over another candidate for the first time, in this case Antoine Tinnion from Labour, who is actually quite nice. Which begs the question, where are the LibDems? After all their posters claim they are “winning here” and their dodgy statistics put them into a self declared second place apparently. Frankly that is simply unsupported by their efforts on the ground.

Our biggest canvass today was Allendale (and a leaflet drop in Allenheads), where we were somewhat mob-handed. With me taking the picture, and Anthony Braithwaite joining at lunch, we were a magnificent 10. We rounded off with Corbridge canvass and ended up in The Angel.

We heard that Labour’s blundering Prime Minister is heading to the North East on Sunday – incredibly he hasn’t visited yet, maybe he’s not wanted. But given his track record of self destruction anything we do on Monday won’t get airtime. So we moved Theresa’s visit to today at very, very short notice. The Alnwick office starting ringing round people at 8 am, checking venues etc, and by 11 am we had the above photo opportunity sorted out, and the BBC’s TV cameras rolling. We ended up leading the regional TV news that night, what a result. I only discovered my role, dealing with Theresa’s logistics, at 9 am.  Here we are, 3 pm, back at Newcastle station by its iconic column arch. In between we went to Newcastle Airport, where the management gave us their view of the challenges involved in running a regional airport.  After that – something completely different. I headed over to Haltwhistle where the local old folks home invited us in for tea. And cake, lots of it. Luckily I arrived late. One lady did a monster spread of carbs for us, and the residents really did seem pleased to see Guy. He didn’t do too much politics, but made a charming speech about him and his background. I’ve no doubt it hit the spot as much as the malt loaf.

Today I’ve been hosting Mark Francois (below, second from right), the shadow Europe minister. He went to the Egger plant in Hexham with Guy Opperman, then to Tynemouth, where Wendy got us out for a brisk round of leafleting in Cullercoats.  Finally we had a long drive up to Berwick, to talk to a farmer about the impact of European policy on farmers – he had a long list. Mark Francois is a real pleasure to have around, a genuine human with considerable generosity of spirit.

One big help today is that it is rubbish collection day, so I was able to locate houses that need leaflets by the wheelie bins. The other clues include following the overhead telephone wires.  A lot of homes around here are second homes or weekend lettings. The worst case I had today being Alwinton, where about half the houses no longer have a voter in them. What’s worse, some people do register at their second home. It’s a bit of red letter day since the postal votes have started to be delivered, so in one real sense polling has started.

One light relief has been a nifty idea by Hexham Cinema. Each of the early declared candidates has been asked to come up with a favourite film to be shown on successive nights at the Forum, which the candidate can then introduce. Guy Opperman’s film was The Shawshank Redemption, playing into his deeply held concerns about prison policy, and a cracking film to boot.

The other candidates’ choices are interesting. In the case of Antoine Tinnion (Labour) it is The Third Man (based on the novel by Graham Greene). Dr Ford (Independent) was suitably zany yesterday with Dr. Strangelove. And you’d never guess this, Andrew Duffield (LD) has gone for The End of Poverty – Think Again.

On one poll we are already ahead! More punters at the cinema than Dr. Ford!