Just £10,000

Just £10,000

Iona Hotchkiss (38), who was employed as a senior designer by the Channel Island Knitwear Company at the Summerland factory in Rouge Bouillon, has been unable to work for eight years following severe pain in her neck which made it impossible for her to sit for long at a drawing-board or computer.She claims that the cause of her illness was the excessive hours which her employers had demanded of her and the poor conditions in which they required her to work.

She alleges that they were negligent in not taking care to protect her from harm.In June 2000 Miss Hotchkiss was awarded £538,577.28 by the Royal Court, who found that her employers had been negligent, and that although the circumstances of her work had not caused her condition they had ‘materially contributed to it by exacerbating it’.But later, the amount awarded for damages was reduced to £184,136 by the Court of Appeal, who interpreted the Royal Court’s finding to mean that even if the company had not been negligent, a pre-existing medical condition resulting in deformation would at some stage have forced Miss Hotchkiss to give up work.The company took their appeal to the Privy Council in the UK.

In a judgment issued last week the Council concluded that having re-examined the evidence of two expert witnesses on the cause of the plaintiff’s condition, they felt Miss Hotchkiss had failed to satisfy them that her injuries were caused by the firm’s negligence.However, they awarded £10,000 in compensation on the grounds that the conditions of employment exacerbated the symptoms which Miss Hotchkiss had suffered during the year before she resigned in 1995.

– Advertisement –
– Advertisement –