I READ with dismay, but little surprise, your article regarding the £12 million bill for slip and trip claims made against the council.

To put this bill into perspective, £12 million represents about £130 of your council tax bill. This money could fund three large secondary schools for 12 months, be used to carry out hundreds of operations, and represents about twice as much as the whole of the highways maintenance budget for Bolton.

Let us first get one thing clear. Anyone who suffers a serious accident at work or on the road deserves reasonable compensation. This concept, however, in recent years has been exploited to include anyone who has had the most minor of accidents. Some people are now claiming thousands of pounds for minor scratches and bruising. The victims of these claims are often schools, hospitals, local authorities and businesses. This leads to scarce resources being diverted from educating our children, curing the sick, and policing the streets, to paying out compensation claims. It is also true to say that many companies are being forced out of business as they are unable to afford the cost of public liability insurance.

The real victim in this collective madness, though, is our society. Personal responsibility has been replaced by claims companies. We sue our doctors, nurses, headmasters, engineers and councils and pursue them through the courts, which leads to a breakdown in trust that all decent societies need to operate successfully.

The solution to this problem is complex but I would urge all your readers to act responsibly and think twice about suing their public services and local businesses. I would encourage local authorities to pursue through the courts all those people and companies making bogus claims, and I would urge Government to introduce strict limits on the amount of money paid to the victims of trips and slips to dozens, rather than thousands, of pounds.

Until action is taken it is the responsible people of Bolton who will face huge rises in their council tax bills not to improve public services, but to fund the ill-judged concept that accidents, however minor, will lead to large pay-outs from the public purse.

Martyn Cox

Blackrod and Horwich Liberal Democrats