Stephen Platko

For 22 years Stephen Platko would get up every morning and take the five-minute walk from his house in the heart of the Nottinghamshire coalfields to the neighbouring pits of the Clipstone Colliery.

More than 40 years since working his first underground shift, in a job that would eventually affect his hearing, his breathing and his mobility, he finds himself battling for money from the very people who were meant to protect him. The 57-year-old former miner is just one of thousands of ailing pitmen who claimed compensation.

Mr Platko was told he was suffering from hearing problems and a condition known as vibration white finger. The long years of inhaling coal dust also caused pneumonicosis.

“I later received a letter saying my claim had been successful,” he said. When the solicitors sent him a bill for £600, he had little reason to doubt the fee request. “I though that was it. Then the stories got worse and worse.”

The solicitors were earning up to £45,000 a day, thanks to the flawed government compensation scheme, which would bring many of the victims themselves awards of less than £1,000.

Peter Dunstan

For Peter Dunstan, 74, a former miner who spent nearly four decades working down the pits, the anger bubbles as fiercely as ever. “It is wicked what they have done. Wicked. We didn’t know they were getting paid twice, but they must have known. They even took from these widows trying to claim for dead husbands and some of these elderly people, who were really suffering after swallowing all that dust.”

Mr Dunstan, who now lives in Worksop, gave up his job as a farm labourer for the £3 weekly wage offered by the Manton Colliery. From the age of 16 until 51, he worked in the coalfields.

He seized the opportunity to claim for compensation, received one payment for £1,400, then was later charged solicitors’ fees of £800 after making separate claims for white finger and loss of hearing.

With the help of John Mann, MP, who has campaigned for fair compensation for miners, Mr Dunstan confronted his lawyers.

“When we went to see them, they were just arrogant. They didn’t want to know you. They treated us like muck. It was like they thought, well, they’re just miners. To them, we were nobody.”

Mr Dunstan has since got his money back, plus compensation.

Roger Bird

Roger Bird, 66, and his wife, Eileen, 60, say that they are determined to see the solicitors responsible held to account. “They are the sort of people who can’t be touched,” he said.

“Someone should have been taken to task. What they have done, in my book, is not just unfair – it should be unlawful. They were in the wrong. They are the wrong party in all of this.”

The couple, who live only five miles from the former site of the Manton colliery, feel aggrieved. They have watched the coal industry buckle and the collieries close. They have weathered the strikes and the industrial strife.

But even now, 18 years after the local pits closed, they have had their retirement disrupted by a protracted legal battle.

“You do lose faith,” said Mrs Bird. “You think that these people – these professionals – are meant to be acting in your own best interests, then something like this comes up and you find that they have been paid not once but twice.

“They must be in their own little world to think that that’s right.”

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