ALL it takes is one committed Labour backbencher, an octogenarian Labour peer and a determined reporter who has the backing of his editor, and you can move mountains – even mountains of legal lies and obfuscations.
Step forward John Mann, MP for the former mining constituency of Bassetlaw, Lord Geoffrey Lofthouse, former MP for Pontefract, Andrew Norfolk, northern correspondent of The Times, and his editors over the past three years. Between them, they have humbled Britain’s highest-earning solicitor, Jim Beresford, who fattened himself to the tune of £37,000 a day from the proceeds of claims for compensation for coal miners who suffered industrial disease.
Last week, Beresford, 58, and his fellow solicitor Doug Smith, 51, were struck off after being found guilty of nine charges of dishonesty and misconduct. The Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal heard that they had set up a sham agreement with the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers, failed to act in the best interests of their clients, failed to give adequate advice and improperly released confidential information.
The six-day hearing at which they were convicted was the culmination of years of forensic political and journalistic effort. Lord Lofthouse named and shamed Beresfords, a Doncaster firm, and a number of other solicitors who had been charging ex-miners and their surviving relatives for taking up their claim for compensation, even though the Government was paying them in excess of £2,000 per case. In all, Beresfords were paid £141 million in fees, but they were not satisfied with that. The firm also sliced a “success fee” amounting to 25 per cent from the miners’ compensation awards, netting a further £718,000.
One example of this cruelty will suffice. The widow of one dead miner was awarded £281.77. Beresfords, who had earned £2,431.08 from handling the case, demanded – and were paid a further £64.04 from the widow’s mite, bringing their rake-off to £2,495.12.
John Mann first demanded that Beresford be struck off three years ago. He is “delighted” to be vindicated. So is Andrew Norfolk, who has stuck with the story through thick and thin. And so is Geoff Lofthouse, who risked obloquy for using the privilege of the House Lords to bring further this scandal to light.
One person not entitled to be quite so chuffed is your correspondent, because Mann came to me with the story and I failed to follow it up properly, being too engrossed at the time in what I regard as another miners’ scandal: the practice – begun by the Tories, but continued under Labour – of the Treasury taking half the annual profits of the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme, running into hundreds of millions of pounds. I apologise for not pursuing this investigation with the vigour it deserved and hope that Norfolk gets an award for his brilliant scoop.
The story does not end there, however. As a result of Mann’s efforts, many more solicitors, including some of the best known in labour movement circles, are also facing tribunal proceedings for what he calls “the biggest robbery from sick retired workers in British history”. Fresh cases are likely to be heard in the new year. And a criminal inquiry by the Serious Fraud Office is continuing – as it has for the past three years.
Miners who were duped by the Beresford scam are being urged to claim back monies wrongly taken from them. Excess fees amounting to around £350,000 have already been repaid. For some, it will be too late, because we are talking about sick, old men, who contracted chronic obstructive pulmonary disease caused by coal dust and vibration white finger – a painful condition caused by working with vibrating tools. The scheme itself has been a success, paying out £6.9 billion in compensation to pitmen and their families.
For the solicitors, it has been the biggest bonanza of recent times, netting them £1.3 billion. For Jim Beresford, who banked £30 million and “earned” the title of the country’s highest-earning solicitor, the money bought a £1.8 million jet, Aston Martins, a Ferrari and extensions to his luxury home in Wetherby, west Yorkshire. Happily, it also brought him disgrace at the hands of the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority, which brought the cases against him and Smith.
Apart from not doing the story myself, my only regret is that The Times did not show such concern for the miners and their families in 1984/85, when the great strike took place. The paper (of which I was then labour editor, covering the event) was involved in helping Margaret Thatcher crush the NUM, via the Working Miners’ Committee, to whose eminence grise David Hart it gave prominent space. He was described at the time as “a freelance journalist”, which, I observed to then Times editor Charles Douglas-Home (nephew of the former Tory Prime Minister), was a bit like calling Thatcher a housewife. True, but not the whole truth.
