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Lord Evans of Temple Guiting: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, on her excellent maiden speech. She has a remarkable record in charity work, especially in health. It is a record that makes her so effective an advocate for those with chronic and acute conditions. After hearing her excellent maiden speech today, nobody can doubt that she will contribute a great deal of knowledge and judgment to debates in your Lordships' House. I congratulate her again.

In the absence of my noble friend Lord Sainsbury, it is a particular pleasure for me, for a number of reasons, to reply to this short debate on behalf of the Government. My father was born in a mining village in South Wales and wrote extensively about the plight of miners. Just before I arrived in your Lordships' House, I chaired a quango that advised government on museums. One of my favourite museums was, and is, the National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield where the oral history of miners and their families vividly illustrates the harshness and ill health that was the miner's lot. Also, by coincidence, last year I read the excellent autobiography of my noble friend Lord Lofthouse, A Very Miner MP. That is a terrible pun but it is a very good book that I commend to any noble Lord interested in the mining industry.

I thank my noble friend Lord Lofthouse for securing this debate and for continuing to keep in the public eye this issue of great human importance. As a general comment, I have heard nothing this evening with which anybody in the Government would disagree. There are
 
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huge administrative problems to be solved but I hope that, in the course of the next few minutes, I shall be able to give noble Lords reassurance that we are tackling these important problems.

When the Government assumed responsibility for the former British Coal's health liabilities in January 1998, they acquired not only a legal but also a moral commitment to ensure that former miners and their families receive 100 per cent of their rightful compensation as speedily as is humanly possible. That is the intention.

As my noble friend is aware, there are two schemes, which cover respiratory and vibration-related diseases respectively. The vibration scheme closed for live claimants in October 2002 and in January 2003 for deceased claimants. The respiratory scheme closed at the end of March this year. The Government and solicitors carried out two highly successful advertising campaigns between 2002 and 2004, prior to the closing dates, which resulted in almost 570,000 claims having been fully registered under the respiratory disease scheme, with some 316,000 claims being received in the last six months of the scheme alone. That is a first clue to the administrative problems that we are facing. In addition, some 170,000 claims were registered under the vibration scheme before it was closed last year. They form the largest personal injury schemes ever in the UK, and possibly in the world, as we heard from my noble friend Lady Morgan, with more than 413,000 individual payments amounting to more than £2.2 billion made to date across both schemes to former miners, their widows and families.

Following the closure of the schemes, claims are still being accepted but these will not be able to go through the schemes. Instead, claims will be processed, as we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, through the personal injury courts. Both High Court judges who oversee the schemes have agreed that that is the appropriate procedure for handling claims that were not registered prior to the extensively advertised scheme closures. Since the closure of the respiratory disease scheme, fewer than 200 claims have been received.

The question that is most asked in the former coalfield areas, and in your Lordships' House today, is: when will the last claim be settled? I am aware that at the current rate it could take more than seven years—my noble friend Lord Lofthouse says 10 years—to process all the claims registered under the scheme. The Government do not believe that that is acceptable, which is a view that has strongly come through from noble Lords today.

In order to reduce that timescale, the DTI is working with the claimants' solicitors to try to streamline the process. Using information gathered from claims processed to date, the parties are looking at whether a way can be found to simplify the processing of claims and to give claimants the opportunity to exit the scheme at an early stage with a fair settlement.

If successful, that approach would have the potential to shorten the scheme by several years. Currently, the DTI and the claimants' solicitors are holding detailed
 
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discussions on this issue and plan to report, as we have heard, to Sir Michael Turner, the judge who oversees the respiratory scheme, later this month when he visits the DTI's claims' handlers. The department is already taking steps to shorten dramatically the timescale of the scheme. In our view, the public inquiry asked for by noble Lords would simply divert resources and delay things further. The scheme is not overseen by only Mr Justice Turner, but by a ministerial monitoring group that was set up in 1999 by Helen Liddell, the then Energy Minister. The group is made up of mining union officials and Members of Parliament.

The Government are aware of the huge responsibility that the liabilities are, and the DTI continues to review the levels of resources employed on the schemes. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, asked about resources within the DTI. There follows a few figures: IRISC, the DTI's claims' handler, has increased its staffing levels from 300 in 2000 to more than 1,300 now. In addition, the DTI, through its medical service provider, is employing around a third of the respiratory specialists in the country on the scheme. The Government are aware that many solicitors are also reviewing their level of resources to ensure that claims are settled quickly.

There have been some discussions between the parties in relation to a minimum payment for claimants. As my noble friend is aware, those low-value offers reflect the original 1998 High Court judgment, which discounts for issues such as smoking. Noble Lords may wish to know that at a recent meeting a member of the solicitors' group stated that it was appreciated from the onset of the scheme that very low offers would be produced and it would be a natural consequence of a scheme that could compensate for only one-day underground. The DTI has therefore rejected calls for it to fund a minimum payment because most low-value offers are accepted and most outstanding offers were for chronic bronchitis, which attracts less compensation because—to be brutal—it is non-disabling. I am also informed that it would divert resources away from making and settling new offers.

The noble Baroness, Lady Barker, mentioned that the claimants' solicitors have put forward a proposal whereby claimant representatives would fund a minimum payment from their fees to the value of £500. The DTI is in discussion with the solicitors with regard to that proposal, in particular to establish that there will be the necessary full take-up of any minimum payment by all claimant representatives. It would clearly be unacceptable for there to be inequitable treatment between different claimants depending on the solicitor handling their claim.

To date we have paid solicitors over £300 million to process claims under the coal health schemes. The majority of those firms have taken the tariffed costs paid by the Government. However, as we have heard, a minority are unethically and immorally taking a percentage of a claimant's compensation in addition to that paid under the agreements, a point powerfully made by my noble friend Lord Lofthouse's example.
 
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Nigel Griffiths wrote to over 700 firms of solicitors handling claims under the coal health schemes asking them to confirm that they were not taking a cut from claimants' compensation and, where they were, that they would immediately confirm that they would repay any such deductions. Over 500 firms responded. The Minister also wrote to the Law Society of England and Wales asking it to ensure that those firms that are charging not only make repayments to clients who contact them, but that they proactively review all their files and repay every individual from whom they have made a deduction. The Minister also passed the names of all the firms yet to respond to the Law Society asking it to take urgent action to ensure that the firms comply with the request.

I should also say that the Law Society wrote to all firms that have handled claims for compensation under the DTI's scheme advising them of the society's policy and reminding them to review all the cases they have handled and to repay any money that was inappropriately withheld from miners who have won compensation. Two hundred and sixty complaints have been received by the Law Society, of which 123 are from MPs on behalf of constituents. To date the Law Society has closed 182 matters, which leaves 78 outstanding. Of the 78 outstanding, 53 are complaints received from MPs.

Of the 182 closed matters, the Law Society has been able to conciliate 84. The other 98 have been closed for a variety of reasons: because the claim is still on-going; the complaint has been withdrawn; the complainant did not wish to take any further action; the matter was resolved without assistance; the solicitor's explanation was accepted by the complainant; or no deductions were in fact made.

A total of £69,726 has been recovered for complainants. However, the actual figure is likely to be more because the society has been able to conciliate complaints through obtaining a refund of fees where it has not always known how much was involved. The amounts recovered have ranged from £11 to approximately £9,000. About half the refunds involved amounts below £1,000, but there have been 16 instances where sums of over £2,000 have been involved.

Those miners who worked purely on the surface were not covered by the High Court judgment. The DTI's expert medical advice is that respirable dust levels on the surface of coal mines were insufficient to cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—COPD—in the majority of cases. My noble friend Lord Dixon disagrees with that view, which is something that we will consider. Surface workers' claims for COPD cannot therefore be paid on a schemed basis under the claims handling agreement for respiratory disease. However, Nigel Griffiths permitted the miners' solicitors to have access to British Coal archives in order to assist them in finding evidence to support their case. Following the latest court hearing on 13 July the solicitors have been ordered to identify lead cases and to present them to the judge in advance of the next respiratory disease court hearing on 4 and 5 October 2004.
 
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Claimants can of course pursue a claim for compensation in relation to surface employment under common law if they wish.

Some miners worked for a group of smaller mines and I know that negotiations on this issue have been difficult and protracted. However, following mediation and negotiation, the claimants' solicitors and the small mines' representatives have been able to resolve their remaining differences. As a result, the small mines will now be included within the terms of the claims handling agreement. The DTI is currently working with the other parties and with its claims handlers, IRISC, to put the settlement reached into operation. As a result of this settlement, small mines' claimants should be able to move from interim payment to full and final settlements.

As to those claimants who worked for UK Coal, the DTI has previously agreed to UK Coal's terms for signing up to the claims handling agreement. However, the claimants' solicitors and UK Coal continued to have issues on which they could not agree. The judge allowed them until the hearing on 12 and 13 July to continue negotiations, after which time, had they still not agreed, he would give directions for litigation.

The parties announced at the July hearing that they had reached an agreement in principle. This is yet to be ratified and the DTI's legal advisers are currently examining the details to ensure that the agreement does not change the DTI position. When all parties are satisfied, then the operational work can begin to produce full and final offers for claimants in this group. In the mean time the DTI cannot calculate either the overall amount of recoverable compensation or how that is to be divided between the DTI and UK Coal, and so cannot pay out its own share of the liability independently.

The Government are of course aware of the concerns that this whole process has caused. Many have been referred to today. A lot of stories have been circulated which have misled ex-miners and their families, such as there being a cap on the liabilities and that the Government are waiting for claimants to die in order to reduce the levels of compensation paid.

We see it as one of the Government's main responsibilities to ensure that we meet our commitments as speedily as possible and that we limit to an absolute minimum the distress caused to those who are entitled to compensation. With the assistance and the co-operation of all the parties involved, this can be and will be achieved.

In the two or three minutes remaining, let me answer some of the points raised in the debate. It may be that I shall have to write to noble Lords.

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