Rob Blackhurst

FT Magazine:

July 1, 2006

In America after September 11, the largest compensation payment made by the government to a victim was Dollars 8.6m. Nearly a year on from the July 7 bombings in London, the highest award is Pounds 141,050. Is this the price to be paid for the capital's famed stoicism?

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Danny Biddle, the last survivor of the London bombings still in hospital, leafs through an A4 booklet that lists how much state compensation victims of crime should get. He was three feet away from Mohammad Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the bombings, when Khan detonated his explosives on an underground train just beyond Edgware Road. His finger moves down the page, set out like a receipt, and he murmurs the values of the injuries listed: "Head burns - minor visible disfigurement Pounds 2,000; Face - moderate disfigurement, Pounds 5,500; Neck - severe disfigurement Pounds 16,500."

This black and white ledger of each body part and its precise value, as decided by parliament under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme, is not for the squeamish. But Danny, who is 27, doesn't mind this. What really offends him is that the state will only compensate him for his three worst injuries - no matter how many he has suffered. Even then, he won't receive the full published amount for the wounds; the state gives itself a discount. He speaks quickly with a mordant humour: "How can they say you got blown up, you almost died, you had all these injuries, but we're only going to compensate you for three of them? These are parts of my body we're talking about - this ain't the Argos catalogue. Eleven months ago these bits were attached to me. They were part of who I was."

I've met Danny in search of the real story behind the compensation for the victims of the London bombings. Throughout the past year there has been a growing sense of outrage over the low compensation being offered. Aggrieved relatives and survivors have marched on Downing Street, holding placards given out by the News of the World, campaigning for higher payments. There have been questions about what seemed to be much more generous compensation paid to the September 11 victims. But when I looked at the press cuttings it was the same few relatives who were being quoted. Obviously some people had been angry. But were they representative? I wanted to speak to some of those who had been less vocal. Had they stayed silent because they were satisfied with their compensation? Were they too busy to be bothered? Or were the louder survivors expressing the neglect and anger that they also felt?

I had expected the victims to be difficult to find - the vast majority of the 700 injured and the relatives of the 52 killed by the four suicide bombers have returned to obscurity to rebuild their lives.

I hadn't, though, expected to be greeted by so much official reticence. I had assumed the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority - the Home Office agency that distributes money to victims of violent crime - would be unable to discuss individual cases, but I had thought its chief executive, Howard Webber, would talk about how the authority had handled the July 7 payments in general. Although the authority's press office answered my specific questions, Webber refused to give an interview. When asked why, the authority blamed the Home Office. In return, the Home Office blamed them. I asked for an interview with Gerry Sutcliffe, the Home Office minister in charge of compensation. That was never granted.

On the chance that there would be some survivors willing to speak, I contacted a secure website run for victims of the King's Cross blast, and the Metropolitan Police. Purely by coincidence, those who eventually responded to my messages were all survivors and bereaved from the blast in the second carriage of a westbound Circle line train in a tunnel just beyond Edgware Road: Danny Biddle, who is a construction site manager; Rob Webb, a local authority press officer whose sister Laura was killed; John Tulloch, a university professor who was seriously injured. With their very different lives, jobs, and circumstances, they represent a cross-section of the misery of July 7.

In Glasgow and London, 480 civil servants weigh up, measure and label the suffering of the 65,000 applicants to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority each year and distribute Pounds 165m of tax-payers' money. They use a price list with hundreds of descriptions of different injuries, ranging in seriousness from Pounds 1,000 for a broken finger to Pounds 250,000 for quadriplegia. To calculate the amount due, they read down the list and, using submitted medical evidence, decide whether an injury is "minor", "significant", "serious" or "permanent". The theory is that as long as you are a victim of violent crime - whether you were punched by a mugger or injured in the London bombings - you will be treated in the same way.

Lawyers describe the system as a "cheap and cheerless" means of compensating for crimes where there is no realistic likelihood of suing the perpetrator. It is not expensive to administer (Pounds 305 a claim on average) and relatively simple for victims to understand. But the no-frills approach also means it can be grindingly slow and very rough in its approximation of justice. One lawyer who appeals at least half the judgments that the CICA makes on behalf of her clients told me that she has had awards raised from Pounds 2,500 to Pounds 250,000 on appeal. (A CICA spokesman said he believed this was exceptional.)

The government, already realising that the system needed reform, grasped within days of the bombings that the slow wheels of the CICA would create a PR disaster. A special team of six, based in London, was set up to provide a fast-track service for July 7 victims. While this sped up claims, the government couldn't change the compensation amounts without a new act of parliament. Payments to bereaved relatives came to be symbolic of official heartlessness. The basic compensation paid for death as a result of a violent crime in Britain is just Pounds 11,000, a similar amount granted to someone suffering a total loss of smell or taste, seriously impaired speech or permanent whiplash. If a victim leaves more than one close relative - for instance parents, a wife and two children - they would then each be given Pounds 5,500.

Louise Gray, a mother of two young children, told the Daily Express that she felt "abandoned" by the government after her husband's death in the bombing on the Circle line at Aldgate: "I am so angry about the Pounds 5,500 amount. It is a paltry amount of money and I found it offensive that they have put such a small price tag on my husband's life."

Danny leans forward on a chair in the corner of his room at the so- new-it-smells-of-paint Queen Mary's Hospital in south-west London. He's wearing a pair of shorts and a stripy shirt and has a short clipped goatee. Surrounded by the detritus of 11 months forced inactivity in hospital - a box set of DVDs, newspapers and magazines - he pores over the CICA's booklet intently, despite the background babble from Trisha on his TV.

He seems as if he could be exactly the same sharp, stocky and gregarious construction site manager who used to play as a 19-stone semi-professional football goalkeeper - until he got on the second carriage of that train at Liverpool Street station last year. Danny clearly remembers the details of that morning - he woke up with a migraine and decided to give himself a lie-in. Working on a hospital building in Wembley at the time, he would usually have been at work by around 7.30am. He almost phoned in sick, but didn't want to miss an important meeting. For three weeks he had been taking the same route to work - changing at Baker Street to take the Jubilee line north to Wembley Park. But on July 7 he missed his stop. Instead, he planned to get off at Paddington and change for the Bakerloo line to Wembley Central. He was leaning against the perspex screen by the double doors - standing, as always, and people-watching. "I looked around. This Asian guy got on and walked down the carriage. He sat down just past me on the other side of the screen." He was "sitting with a rucksack over his shoulders and a main bag in his lap over his chest". Danny watched him look at his wrists several times - as if checking the time. "When he first put his hand in the bag my first thought was medication, or he's getting something to eat, or he's a diabetic, whatever. As the train pulled out of Edgware Road station, he put his hand back in the bag, lifted his head and looked up and then there was light like a thousand camera flashes going off. And, when I think about it, where he sat down was where there was the biggest congregation of people."

Many of Danny's injuries aren't visible. He has a brown prosthetic eye that is a perfect match for the one the surgeons managed to save; he's deaf in one ear, and had to have his spleen removed. But others are all too apparent: his left leg is amputated to the hip, his right leg amputated just above the knee. He lost his hair and eyebrows from the force of the explosion, which makes him look older than he is. He has milky white chemical burns on his arms from the bomb. He lifts his shirt to reveal a thick cross in scar tissue the length of his torso - the result of operations to remove his spleen and restart his heart.

Danny has memorised the arithmetic of his Pounds 118,760 award: he got 100 per cent of the CICA amount set for the most serious injury; 30 per cent for the second most serious, and 15 per cent for the third. "I get Pounds 110,000 for losing both legs. And then I get Pounds 8,100 for losing an eye. They valued my spleen at Pounds 660. They don't compensate me for the fact that I was set alight and suffered secondary burns. I had two heart attacks and have permanent lung damage. I died three times in the operating theatre."

When the CICA scheme began in 1964, it introduced the then radical concept that victims of crime should be compensated as an "expression of public sympathy". The scheme was seen as a success, copied by most European countries, until a furore in the mid-1990s about "compensation culture". Then home secretary Michael Howard decided to cap total compensation at Pounds 500,000 in each case. This limit has remained, despite 10 years of inflation. In practice, only a handful of cases each year reach this figure.

The scheme has two elements - compensation that can be claimed for injuries (up to a maximum of Pounds 250,000) and compensation for lost earnings (capped at Pounds 32,923 a year until, together with injury compensation, the Pounds 500,000 limit is reached). Up to the age of 18, a child can receive up to Pounds 2,000 a year for "loss of parental services"; funeral expenses can be paid; and dependants of a breadwinner who has been killed can claim compensation for lost earnings. These lost earnings mean that bankers are likely to get more compensation for the same crime than bus drivers. Victims complain that the scheme penalises those who have financial support provided by a third party - whatever their earnings. If the seriously injured banker has critical injury insurance provided by her employer, or the wife of a murdered bus driver receives a payment from the life insurance provided by her husband's employer, then those amounts will be deducted from CICA compensation. However, victims are allowed to keep any cheque they receive from private injury or death cover without it affecting their CICA awards.

For a while the government maintained that the bombings should be treated like any other violent crime - while energetically fast- tracking the claims. Charles Clarke, the former home secretary, said: "Whether you are stabbed outside the pub or maimed by an explosion on a Tube train, it's not actually the way in which you are injured that is the key thing - provided it's a criminal act - but the extent of the injuries."

But media pressure continued to grow. The News of the World organised a protest outside Downing Street with a group of survivors carrying "What About the Victims?" placards, and backbenchers started asking questions at Prime Minister's Questions. Suddenly, in May, the News of the World declared its campaign a victory: "TRAGIC victims of the 7/7 London bombings are to have their compensation payments DOUBLED, the News of the World can reveal."

Danny scoffs about the paper's declaration of victory on his behalf: "I see letters in newspapers saying: 'It's great to see the government doing right by the 7/7 survivors.' That's the power of political spin. The News of the World said that compensation is going to be doubled. But after that article we found out that - under their breath - the government are really saying that we will get a 50 per cent increase in compensation rather than double." This would have resulted in an extra Pounds 59,380 for Danny.

But since my interview with him there has been another twist. Instead of the guaranteed 50 per cent increase, the Home Office has added Pounds 2.5m to the Pounds 1m the government gave earlier to the London Bombings Relief Charitable Fund - a charity set up by Ken Livingstone and the Red Cross within days of the attack to help the bereaved and most seriously injured survivors. Danny does not yet know how much he will receive.

He picks up a notebook on his bedside table in which he has written questions that he wants to ask on the "off-chance that I can sit down with somebody from the Home Office". Over the past few days, Danny has been digesting the Home Office's recently published "narrative" of the chain of events leading up to July 7, and other reports, and making notes. "Khan should have been lifted," he says emphatically.

The fact that officials admitted that the bomber was "on the periphery of other investigations" and resources were diverted elsewhere, makes Danny think that there has been a cover-up by the security services. "It's an Etonian boys club and they all stick together - for whatever reason they didn't do their job properly."

He's campaigning with other survivors for a public inquiry into the failure. "That day, the minute Khan stepped into that carriage, I entered a war-zone and I didn't know - and I had no protection. You elect a government to protect the people it governs. This government failed badly, so surely the next stage is: 'We should have protected you but didn't, so we will take care of you.' And they're not even doing that.

"The CICA system needs to be there. But it is designed for someone who gets knocked over in the street, not for someone who gets on a train with a bomb. There needs to be an alternative system for when something like the 7th of July happens. It's very frustrating as a survivor to work out how I'm going to live for the rest of my life on possibly very limited funds."

Danny's employers have been generous, paying him since the bombings, and he has a claim for lost earnings from the CICA that is outstanding. But he still fears that his medical bills could prove so costly they could eat up his compensation.

He is testing a prosthetic limb that he describes as "pretty much last chance saloon. If this leg doesn't work I'm going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life". He wants the financial security to know that if more advanced prosthetic limbs come on to the market in the US, and his Primary Care Trust can't afford the Pounds 20,000 cost, he will be able to buy it privately. "Being disabled isn't cheap," he says. He's already spent Pounds 10,000 on wheelchairs and a specially adapted car and another Pounds 10,000 decorating, furnishing and adapting a council bungalow - he had to move out of his previous home because of the stairs.

"On some mornings," says Danny, "you wake up and feel wrecked - you can't face it. You want to pull the duvet over your head, stick two fingers up and stay there." But he feels that life is slowly improving. He does intensive physio in the hospital from Monday to Friday and goes home at weekends. He's still getting used to the irritations of his new life: strangers staring, wearing factor 50 sun-cream to protect his burns, dealing with an unsympathetic council when trying to make his new accommodation suitable for an amputee. But, in the end, he says he's "one of the lucky ones".

A few days after seeing Danny, I hear from Rob Webb, whose 29-year- old sister Laura was killed in the same Edgware Road bomb. Laura went missing as she travelled from her Islington home to her job as a personal assistant at an advertising company in Paddington. Her two brothers searched for her in hospitals across London for a week and distributed photographs of an attractive, laughing young woman with fair curls.

As a professional press officer, Rob is softly spoken and reasonable, the opposite of an angry-relative-on-a-mission. "We're not jumping up and down about the speed of compensation because we didn't apply until late. It was just another ghastly task among many ghastly tasks," he says.

The CICA awarded his parents compensation of Pounds 11,000 - the standard award for death with no dependants. In his quiet way Rob thinks the compensation is too low. "You get the cheque with mixed feelings. It almost feels vulgar and money-grabbing to talk about it. I know the CICA are careful to say in the literature that this is not compensation for loss. But if there is to be an amount that they name, then my sister is worth more than that. Money wasn't a big worry for us the way that it would have been for other families. But if you've just lost a breadwinner or have financial obligations it is not enough at all."

The government "took a while to wake up" after the bombings and communicate the help available to relatives, he says. "It was useful that the CICA cover funeral expenses - which is something that not many people spotted." Instead of formulas based on lost earnings, Rob thinks that everyone should be given the same lump sum. Terrorism cases should be treated as different to usual criminal injury. "It is not the same as other crimes. It is an attack on the state. Relatives and victims in other situations can have other means of getting compensation. I've got a colleague who hit a lump in the road and fell off his bike. He'll get compensation from the council - it's an open-and-shut case. But how can you sue a man who blew himself up?"

In a Lebanese restaurant just round the corner from Paddington station I meet John Tulloch, another survivor of the Edgware Road bombing. Tulloch is an urbane and dry Australian, a professor of social sciences at Brunel University who commutes between London and his home in Cardiff. He was one of the few survivors able to stumble out on to the street into the glare of the media. His photograph became one of the most famous images of the bombing - forehead swaddled in bandages, his face swollen and encrusted with blood, eyes shell-shocked as a paramedic attends to him.

An academic with crisp anti-war and liberal views, he has just published a well-crafted memoir, One Day in July, about his year in the public glare. As he writes in the book, he objected to The Sun using his image on a page one story in favour of Blair's terrorism laws that were then going through parliament.

In the flesh, he's unrecognisable from the battered bomb victim and looks exactly as a lecturer in his early sixties should. His glasses are square, his hair is cropped and his build is compact. Small bluish green flecks from the shrapnel crisscross his forehead but otherwise he doesn't bear any outward scars from his ordeal. He's wearing his "lucky shoes" - a pair of brown brogues that he was wearing on July 7. Though they were covered in blood and debris, they now show only the tiniest scuffmarks.

When he got on the Circle line at 8.46am at Euston Square, en route for Paddington and a train to Cardiff, it was his long-haul luggage from a recent trip back to Australia that probably saved his life. Like Danny, he was three feet away from Khan when the bomb went off. A laptop bag and a black cabin-bag resting on his lap shielded his upper body and a heavy-duty suitcase on the carriage floor saved his legs.

Although he was one of the few able to walk out of the wrecked carriage, the bomb has had long-term effects on Tulloch. His eardrums were perforated and severe concussion has made "multi- tasking difficult". Early on, he struggled to "put abstract thoughts together" and, ever since he returned to work in January, he has been relieved of some of his ancillary administrative duties. So far operations to restore his hearing haven't worked. His university department has been supportive - paying his full wages throughout - but he still has nagging worries about possible future symptoms and whether he'll be able to return to full duties.

Tulloch is diffident on the subject of his own compensation - "there are people who have a far better case than I do" - but a recent incident with a compensation cheque has made him fear that his condition might be worse than he previously thought. A few months ago he told a newspaper that he hadn't received any compensation - except for Pounds 10 to cover lost photographs. "I owe a mea culpa," says Tulloch. "I'd said I hadn't got any compensation - the CICA must have read it. They contacted me personally and said that they'd received a signed letter from me saying I accepted Pounds 2,500 as an interim payment. They sent a cheque out which had been cashed. So I checked with my bank and found that they were right. I couldn't believe it. I had received and banked it with absolutely no recollection." He's had other small memory lapses - such as leaving the gas on all night - and this shows that the concussion could be having long-term effects: "I'm starting to worry now about what else I'm forgetting."

Tulloch complains that he was pressured and misrepresented by the News of the World when he reluctantly agreed to support its campaign for compensation. An interview in which he admitted that he was kept awake by thoughts in the middle of the night was translated into an article headlined "I'm living in fear I'll go broke". It had him worrying that much of his hearing had gone and fearing his pay would be halved and he wouldn't be able to pay his mortgage.

But he now thinks that the tabloid campaign may have been right. "To be fair to the News of the World, now that I've got big ongoing problems maybe I shouldn't have been back at work. And maybe part of that worry was money." He abruptly interrupts our mint tea. "I'd better run," he says, and then, completely deadpan, "I've got into trouble running for the Cardiff train before."

I talk to a sample of pro bono lawyers working for victims of the bombings to see how their clients are being treated. Sally Moore from Leigh Day & Co is representing a widow with two children: "The three of them will only get a payment of Pounds 5,500 each. She isn't eligible for more because she has received a death-in-service benefit from her husband's job."

Richard Langton, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, tells me about another woman bereaved in the bombings: "She's been widowed in her thirties without children. She will get Pounds 5,500 because the award will be shared by other family members. That sum does seem pretty disgraceful." But there are no complaints about speed. Sally Moore says that the CICA are usually a "joke" but the July 7 payments have been "far better".

When I checked with the CICA, the statistics show that the London bombing claims are certainly being fast-tracked as intended. Victims have been sent compensation offers within two to four months - compared with an average 10 months for other crimes. But this two-tier service is further enraging some pro bono lawyers. For years their complaints about the CICA have been ignored because victims haven't had the same media profile. But their suffering is just as great. One lawyer mentions a client whose husband was murdered on the doorstep of their home. "Her life has been totally ripped apart - there is no difference in what she is going through and the bombing victims."

Fearing a backlash, the CICA wrote to every criminal compensation claimant in Britain assuring them that their cases were not being slowed down by the attention given to the London bombings. But in financial terms at least, bombing victims have been treated as a special case.

Tony Blair flatly contradicted Charles Clarke's earlier comment that all violent crimes were the same when he told the Commons that "the attacks on July 7 were wholly exceptional" and its victims needed "additional support".

Usually, a victim's means-tested state benefits such as income support can be reduced if the compensation award is above Pounds 8,000. Bombing victims will be able to keep their benefits intact regardless of their CICA compensation or donations from the London Bombings Relief Charitable Fund.

Since July 7, constant comparisons have been made between the largesse extended to victims of September 11 and the amounts paid by the CICA. In the weeks after September 11, Congress created an unlimited compensation fund for victims and appointed lawyer Kenneth Feinberg to decide how much to pay the more than 5,000 injured and bereaved.

The scheme was set up in haste because of fears that allowing relatives to sue the airlines whose planes were used in the attacks for breaches in security would force them into administration. Emergency laws were passed to cap the airlines' liability and those who agreed to accept Feinberg's compensation had to waive the right to sue other parties.

The basic aim was to maintain a pre-September 11 standard of living for life - whether victims and their families got assistance from private insurance or government funds. The average award for death was just over Dollars 2m and the average award for physical injury was Dollars 393,000.

Awards for the injured ranged from Dollars 500 for a man who broke his finger in the World Trade Centre to Dollars 8.6m for a man with third degree burns over 85 per cent of his body. The comparison with London is stark. The highest compensation award for death in the July 7 bombings so far has been Pounds 141,050; the lowest award has been Pounds 722 to reimburse funeral expenses paid by a bereaved friend or relative.

For personal injury, the average payout has been Pounds 6,094 so far, and the largest has been an interim payment to Danny of Pounds 118,000 (he's still due to be paid an additional Pounds 760).

The average award for death, across the 33 cases that have been finalised, is Pounds 17,262. In only one of these cases - perhaps because so many of those killed by the bombs were young, childless or nearing retirement - has lost-earnings compensation been paid. As the CICA points out, the September 11 comparison is not entirely fair. Feinberg's scheme was designed to be an alternative to litigation so it had to be lucrative enough to discourage lawsuits. And it was solely directed at those killed or injured on September 11. As such, it was exceptional. With no federal compensation authority, the wife of someone caught in the crossfire of a shooting would not normally receive more than a few thousand dollars in victim support funds.

But the comparison still stands. Though few said it openly, I detected a sense of bewilderment among relatives that Britain's worst terrorist event since Lockerbie, with the huge attendant publicity, the "You've picked the wrong city" placards, and the rhetoric of solidarity from politicians, had not resulted in more practical assistance for victims. Perhaps the truth is simple: the flipside of London's celebrated stoicism is that we don't pay enough attention to the bereaved and injured. We've avoided the lip-trembling Americanisms about "heroes for freedom", the shrines to the dead and the public outpourings of emotion. But we've also given the victims substantially less. The Americans made a different choice: that seriously injured or bereaved victims of September 11 should be freed from financial concerns for the rest of their lives. In Britain, our system means that victims are supposed to face future insecurity like everyone else - even if that creates additional anxieties for those who've already had enormous misfortune.

On his early morning drive to court, I speak to Leo Boyle who, as then president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, set up a pro bono scheme for 9/11 victims that represented 1,700 families claiming from Feinberg's fund. Although the scheme was criticised as complicated, cold-hearted and ungenerous, in the end 97 per cent of eligible survivors and relatives signed up. Boyle now says it was an "unqualified success". "We don't have victims or their families having to sell their homes or moving to new neighbourhoods. We don't see them having to withdraw their kids from college. We wanted everyone to return to their economic life of September 10… the issue for us was simple. The feeling everyone had was 'I could have died that day. It could have been my wife, my children or myself.' How a country responds to a terrorist attack is the ultimate test of a country's character. Now is when we get to find out. I hope Britain does the right thing."

Later, I am called by one of the 9/11 bereaved whom Boyle's pro bono scheme helped (he prefers not to be identified). His wife, a business executive, was on one of the hijacked aircraft, leaving two young children. "I kissed her goodbye at 6am that morning and she took the car to the airport. What can I say?" In his forties and almost five years on, he misses his wife "like hell", but has remarried, created a new life and "pulled himself up by his bootstraps".

He speaks frankly and philosophically, with a thick New York accent: "God bless Feinberg. He had to play God and he did an unbelievable job. The money was more than fair, it was a gift. My wife earned good money and was young so I got given five million bucks. I believe I was in the top 10 per cent of awards."

But, financially at least, he feels more privileged than other victims of circumstance: "If my wife had been run over in the street by a drunk driver, we would have been screwed. 9/11 took the country by surprise. Do I think that level of compensation will happen again? Absolutely not. I was the beneficiary of it. It was a knee-jerk reaction to the situation. But there should be a half- way point between what we did in the US and what is happening in London."

I heard plenty of anecdotal stories of official thoughtlessness from British victims. Survivors say that they heard nothing from the government until the memorial service in the autumn - though Prince Charles did write to those who had been bereaved. When Danny contacted John Reid's office to ask whether he could have a short meeting with the new home secretary to discuss the bombings he was told by his office: "Well he's a very busy man." "It was the wrong thing to say to me," says Danny. "Before this happened I was a busy man too." His report of a contact with a civil servant organising a meeting for Edgware Road survivors is even worse. When Danny asked whether transport was being provided, he was told there was a Tube stop nearby.

In the US, Feinberg felt that it was his duty to encourage as many legitimate claims as possible. He offered to meet each family to discuss their case, and visited those who hadn't claimed compensation to find out why.

Aside from John Tulloch and his forgotten cheque, most of the British victims and families I spoke to had not heard personally from the CICA. Others had not yet filled in the forms and were only dimly aware of the scheme. This is perhaps inevitable if terrorism victims are to be processed along with every other victim of violent crime. But the CICA's low profile and its desire to shun publicity is hardly a useful strategy if it is encouraging legitimate victims to claim.

Its website does contain a useful guide for victims of the bombings, however if you type CICA into Google the first hit is not the agency itself, but a website run by a private claims company that calls itself CICA. It offers to "provide an experienced criminal injury compensation specialist to help you with your application".

Donald Goodrich is chairman of the Board of Families of September 11, an organisation representing 2,200 survivors, bereaved family members and others affected by 9/11. His son, Peter Goodrich, a 33- year-old product development manager for a software company, was on United Airlines Flight 175, the second plane to fly into the World Trade Center. I call him at the Massachusetts law firm where he is a partner. He is campaigning for future compensation to be funded not by the taxpayer but by forcing every organisation - including airlines - to insure against the full costs of terrorist attacks. If they could have done more to prevent an attack, they should be liable for the compensation bill, he says.

"If transport companies are told that if you screen passengers, your insurance premiums will be halved, then they will start doing it. The trucking industry will start checking the identity of their employees. You have to enlist the whole nation in terrorism protection."

Donald Goodrich's determination to restore dollar for dollar the life that victims would have had if the terrorists had not succeeded reminded me of something Danny said as I was leaving his hospital room. "I want to stand up and walk out of this like it never happened. I want to put my football boots and goalkeepers gloves on and run around the pitch. I can't even look in the mirror when I shave now because I don't like what looks back. I don't want to be in hospital. The number of times I've phoned my Dad and said 'come and get me - I've had enough'. But if I discharge myself Khan wins. He kills me but in a different way."