Compensation culture

"Compensation culture" is a pejorative term used to imply that, within a society, a significant number of claims for compensation for torts are unjustified, frivolous, or fraudulent, and that those who seek compensation should be criticised. It is used to describe a "where there's blame, there's a claim" culture of litigiousness in which compensation is routinely and improperly sought without being based on the application of legal principles such as duty of care, negligence, or causation. Ronald Walker QC defines it as "an ethos [which believes that] all misfortunes short of an Act of God are probably someone else's fault, and that the suffering should be relieved, or at any rate marked, by the receipt of a sum of money."

The notion of a compensation culture has also been conflated with health and safety legislation and excessively risk-averse decisions taken by corporate bodies in an apparent effort to avoid the threat of litigation.

The phrase was coined in an article by Bernard Levin in London's The Times newspaper dated 17 December 1993. The article, largely a polemic against the welfare state, carried the sub-heading: "We may laugh at ludicrous court cases in America, but the compensation culture began in Britain and is costing us dear."

The term is especially used in tabloid journalism and by advocates of tort reform to describe a perceived legal climate with regard to torts in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Lord Dyson, the third most senior judge in England and Wales, has dismissed the existence of a compensation culture in the UK as a false perception and a "media-created myth." James Hand, writing in the Journal of Law and Society, observed that sensationalist stories about compensation awards "evidently make for good copy; national newspaper articles concerning the compensation culture have increased exponentially since the mid 1990s," while statistics conversely demonstrated "a broad decline" in the number of claims during the same period.

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