I am a partner at the law firm Rowe Cohen, and recently I successfully defended a 100,000 claim against a childminder who had been accused of negligence. In this case an eight-year-old girl had fallen at the top of the stairs of the childminder's home and badly injured herself on a table.
I believe many childminders expect they will automatically be found at fault, irrespective of whether they're innocent.
People talk of a growing compensation culture, but just because someone has been accused of something doesn't mean they will automatically be found to blame because of the fact that it is a child who has been harmed rather than an adult.
It's perhaps a natural inclination for outsiders to automatically look to the child- minder for blame when a child suffers an accident in their care, but this is completely wrong and unfair.
There can be a whole host of reasons other than negligence, such as the safety of the house, the safety of the furniture and the age of the child.
For example, if a child is told to do something and he or she ignores it, but is old enough to know better, the childminder should not take total blame.
The common perception nowadays is that it's so easy to sue others. But that's simply not the case. I just hope childminders don't assume they'll always be blamed automatically because the victim is younger than them and supposedly helpless.
Robert Sproston
Manchester
