Tourists attract compensation claims
It has emerged that popular tourist attraction venues have had to fork out millions in compensation claims, after tourists received personal injury.
The cases include dozens of injuries caused by trips and slips and were revealed in a survey of Britain’s castles, national parks, museums and country houses.
The accident claims were exposed in the study of 24 organisations, which cover hundreds of individual sites between them.
The survey found that they had paid out at least £2,149,345 in compensation payments and legal costs in the last five years. Almost all of the attractions which took part receive subsidies from the taxpayer.
In several cases, the payouts have been made by insurance companies, but the costs would have been passed on in higher premiums.
Claims not a very good attraction
Some of the claims include: a payout of £23,651 and legal fees of £29,863 for a woman who was injured in a revolving doorway at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.
The incident occurred when a queue formed inside the museum as she was entering via its main entrance. She stopped in the door but it continued moving and she fell, hurting her hip.
In a separate case, the V&A paid £400 to a man who put his thumb in hot soup in the museum's restaurant. He had found the food counter unattended and helped himself to the soup, scalding himself in the process.
Six people received compensation totalling £26,990 from the Tate Modern gallery. Two individuals were hurt on the slides, while one visitor injured a foot in Doris Salcedo's artwork, which comprised a large crack in the gallery's floor.
One of the claimants of the Tate Modern, a 63-year-old charity worker from Glasgow who received around £3,500 from the gallery, said: “I wasn't that keen to take a public institution for any money, but I got annoyed when they weren't willing to listen to the advice I was trying to give them.”
Lastly, a woman suffered pelvic and hip injuries and received £15,000 from English Heritage, which also paid her legal costs of £37,250, despite her trespassing at the Carlisle Castle at 2am and falling into a moat.
The claim was the largest made by the Heritage. A spokesman for English Heritage commented: “The woman passed a sign stating that our opening hours were 10am to 4pm as well as a notice saying 'Please take care, historic sites can be hazardous'. She can have been in no doubt that she was not entitled to enter and was trespassing.”
In many instances, the organisations paid out far more in fees to the claimant's injury lawyers than to the claimant themselves, creating further criticism of so-called “ambulance chasing” lawyers and the system that awards them “success fees” from losing defendants in injury cases.
Simon Jenkins, chairman of the National Trust, had previously warned how health and safety rules are making it difficult to encourage people to venture outdoors- as some areas have been closed off to the public as a result of such claims.
Updated on 26/04/2010