Asked by: Lord Walney (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people applied for compensation under the pleural plaques compensation scheme in each parliamentary constituency; and what proportion of those people settled (a) in part and (b) in full.
Answered by Lucy Frazer
The pleural plaques compensation scheme ran between 2 August 2010 and 1 August 2011 and was administered by the Ministry of Justice. A total of 9511 applications were made to the scheme, of which 9018 were successful. Applications were not recorded by parliamentary constituency.
The scheme operated as an extra-statutory scheme, making £5000 payments on an ex-gratia basis to applicants who fulfilled the scheme’s criteria, namely that they were individuals who had begun, but not resolved, a legal claim for compensation for pleural plaques at the time of the House of Lords ruling in October 2007 in the case of Rothwell v Chemical & Insulating Co Ltd [2007] UKHL 39. That ruling had held that the occurrence of pleural plaques is not a compensatable disease.
Eligibility for the scheme was limited to that category of people as they would have had an understandable expectation of receiving compensation when they began their claim, an expectation which would not have been shared by those diagnosed later.