Nearly all the cases, and there are, I regret to say, many, where the Court of Appeal has overruled the County Court, and the County Court judgment has ultimately been restored by the House of Lords, the error has been in the Court of Appeal striving to find a reason to hinder the payment of compensation, rather than searching for the principle which brought an admitted injury within the scheme that Parliament has made to compensate the injured. After all, the Act was one for the compensation of workmen, and every case of injury that is found not to be provided for is a blot on the scheme.
The expense of all these appeals, is of course, a terrible burden, and to a workman without a trade union behind him would be impossible. Great confusion has been caused by having to work certain matters for considerable periods under decisions of the Court of Appeal that have afterwards had to be dealt with differently by decisions in the House of Lords. Very likely if there were a further appeal to a House of Archangels the Court of Appeal would be upheld. But to the injured man in the works and the arbitrator waiting to award him his few shillings a week what could be more pitiable and exasperating than the delay and expense that the present method of working the Act entails? One solid reason why the appeals in workmen’s compensation cases should be removed from the Court of Appeal is that they cannot be heard within a reasonable time. The Law Journal of June 13th, 1914, states that there are seventy-three workmen compensation appeals waiting to be heard, of which no less than ten were entered in 1913. It would be interesting to know how the appellants manage in the interim.
The Act itself was difficult enough no doubt to make into a good working scheme by those who desired to do it; the hundredweights of handsomely published and learnedly edited reported decisions as to what it really means have made it hopelessly impossible to comprehend and increasingly difficult to administer.
To sum up the position of the Act to-day, with its myriad encircling decided cases, one can only say, with the immortal Sergeant Arabin, that it “bristles with pitfalls as an egg is full of meat.”
When you have an Act of Parliament that in at least a dozen reported cases is solemnly decided to mean x in the Court of Appeal and y in the House of Lords, x representing “against the workman” and y “for the workman,” what does the man in the street think about it? And yet I cannot believe there is so much difficulty about construing the Act if the Courts would all steer by those excellent sailing directions of Lord Halsbury and Lord Davey.
Lord Halsbury said:
“The broad proposition, of course, was that the Legislature intended that there should be compensation given to every workman in certain trades when an injury happened to him in the course of his employment.”
Lord Davey said:
“I entirely agree with what has been said by my noble and learned friend on the Woolsack that you ought to construe this Act so as, as far as possible, to give effect to the primary provisions of it.”
Now the primary provision of the Act was to compensate workmen for injuries, not to leave them uncompensated, and to do the business promptly and simply. We want more of the spirit of the Act and less of the letter, and a great deal fewer forms and orders and rules. In a word, more business and less procedure. As a dear old lady said to me when, after several efforts to set her affairs right, the registrar and myself had at last got her to fill up the papers necessary, as things are now, to get her case through: “I tell you candidly, Judge, all this filling up of papers and signing things has been more worry to me than the loss of my old man.”