A solicitor whose firm specialises in compensation claims for sick miners made a personal profit of £16.8 million in one year.

Jim Beresford is the senior partner in Beresfords, a firm in Doncaster which registered more than 90,000 claims under the Government-run scheme. He is named today as Britain’s highest-earning solicitor.

Tens of thousands of former miners whose health was damaged by their years of work underground have received awards of less than £1,000.

More than 15,000 claimants died before they received any money, yet in 2005, when the scheme was running at its peak, 56-year-old Mr Beresford grew richer at a rate of £45,892 every day.

The bulk of his firm’s profits were paid by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) for its work on claims by miners suffering from chronic respiratory disease or a disabling hand condition called vibration white finger (VWF).

Thousands of the claims registered by Beresfords were handed to the firm by the Not-tinghamshire-based Union of Democratic Mineworkers.

Details of the union’s financial relationship with three law firms, including Beresfords, handling coal claims were revealed by The Times in 2005 and are the subject of a Serious Fraud Office investigation.

In that year, Beresfords, which has only three partners, earned a pretax profit of £20.4 million.

The bulk went to Mr Beresford, while the remaining £3.6 million was shared between his daughter, 28-year-old Esta Beresford, and her fellow partner, Doug Smith, 50.

The Lawyer magazine, published today, calculates that Mr Beresford’s share of the profits makes him the highest-earning solicitor in Britain, topping the estimated £13 million earned in 2005-06 by Andrew Nulty.

Mr Nulty, 40, is the senior partner at Avalon, based in Warrington, Cheshire, another law firm that has earned huge profits from coal health claims.

Mr Beresford, the vice-chairman of Doncaster Rovers FC, has splashed out £1.8 million on a private jet and extensive improvements to his home at Linton, near Wetherby, North Yorkshire, while his daughter spent £470,000 on a house at Ingmanthorpe Hall, near Wetherby.

Mr Smith invested £840,000 in 2003 to set up home at Noblethorpe Hall, near Barns-ley, which has ample parking space for the two cars he acquired for £200,000 in 2005: an Aston Martin DB9 and a Bentley Arnage.

The coal-fired surge in the firm’s fortunes is also reflected in its glittering head office. Until 2003, Beresfords operated from a cramped, redbrick building on one of the main arterial routes into Doncaster.

Following a £4.8 milion investment, its home is now a glass-fronted lakeside development covering 38,000sq ft at the town’s prestigious Quay Point business park.

A spokesman for Beresfords said that the firm was “delighted to have settled more chronic obstructive pulmonary disease claims for clients than any other firm in the country and to have been able to obtain in excess of £180 million of compensation”. In total, Beresfords registered 80,800 respiratory disease and 11,600 VWF claims. It has been paid £98 million by the DTI in legal costs.

Scores of law firms across Britain scrambled to sign up clients in the late 1990s when British Coal lost two separate High Court group actions brought by former miners.

By the end of last year, compensation awards had been paid to 427,000 miners — or to the families of deceased miners — with respiratory disease and 142,000 with VWF. More than half (225,000) of those who were given money for chronic chest conditions were paid less than £2,000 and 13,000 received less than £200.

By January, more than £800 million of public money had been paid in legal costs to the 30 highest-earning solicitors’ firms involved in registering and settling claims.

The DTI estimates that when the final payout has been made, solicitors representing claimants will have earned a total of £1.3 billion from the scheme.

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