During the past year, a new term has crept into the British political vocabulary: the ‘culture of compensation’. Newspapers have begun to debate and try to make sense of this ‘new’ phenomenon. Considerable public disquiet has been expressed about the large compensation payments received by members of the police and other essential services. As pay-outs for medical negligence have reached record figures, many observers have raised questions about how far Britain has gone down the road of America’s culture of compensation.
