The Ogden Tables
These Tables took their name from Michael Ogden QC who was the chair of the working party which first drew them up. They involve the calculation of multipliers for future financial loss in personal injury cases based on actuarial principles. They are of crucial significance in personal injury cases.
The multiplier takes a claimant’s life expectancy and multiplies it by a rate of annual loss. The age of the claimant is a key factor. The Tables do not refer at all to a claimant who does not know his or her age.
The assessment of compensation is a highly-paid branch of law on its own. It is practically impossible for a successful claimant to accurately calculate his amount of compensation himself. Money can thus be made by lawyers from deciding on an amount of money.
The assessment of amounts of compensation for civil wrongs depends, as a starting point, on the age of the claimant. Legal textbooks dealing with civil procedure state, without further explanation, that formulas for future loss of earnings and other aspects of compensation depend upon the claimant’s age. The assumption of knowledge of age is the basis of the entire system of assessing amounts of compensation. Did the compilers of the Ogden Tables realise that some citizens have no birth certificates? Those of us who have worked with deprived persons from the Afro-Caribbean community know that, for a number of the middle aged and elderly, their date of birth is unknown. They know that they were born in the Caribbean fifty or sixty years ago but they have no record of their date of birth. The absence of proper certification systems in the colonial or post-colonial territories, with the implication of a legacy of slavery, means that such persons are at a huge disadvantage in their dealings with the legal system. On top of their weakness on financial and educational grounds, they face the added disadvantage of a third-world registration system up against a first-world legal system. How can you assess compensation if the client does not know his or her age? The unthinking assumption that all potential claimants know their dates of birth can be characterised as a form of unintentional racism in that it places certain ethnic groups at a disadvantage.
The issue of those who do not know, or cannot prove their age, is significant in the context of asylum and immigration cases, where “age dispute” is a recognised area of law. The Ogden Tables are untouched by this reality.