Are injured feelings really worth more than a lost limb?

For maimed soldiers, Kerry Fletcher's huge award for sexual harassment must have been a further insult
    • The Observer,
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Once it became generally known that the MoD operates a sliding scale of compensation for the loss of different limbs on the battlefield, £48,875 per eye for instance, it was inevitable that any extra-battlefield compensation to soldiers would be converted into the currency of missing body parts.

The new payout of £187,000 for Lance Bombardier Kerry Fletcher, the lesbian soldier who endured sexual harassment by a sergeant, including a maximum £30,000 for her hurt feelings, provoked instant calculations on the limb exchange rate, followed by a good deal of resentful comment. Did anything more than sympathetic guesswork go into working out that Fletcher's losses amounted to roughly four eyes? Or was it more systematic?

For example, Fletcher's tribunal might have taken the 1995 cost of being called an 'Irish prat' (£15,000), factored in the personal aspect of her own discrimination, allowed for inflation and the change in public attitudes towards sexual diversity, multiplied by, say, five, for luck - and then remembered, at the last minute, that an RAF typist recently won damages of £484,000 after injuring a thumb.

Look at it like that and maybe Lance-Bombardier Fletcher, who was persecuted to the point that she gave up her army career, deserved at least another foot's worth. Or would that come too close to the £250,000 awarded, not long ago, to a transsexual colleague who was ordered to wear a man's uniform?

The tribunal found that Fletcher's treatment by a predatory senior - who texted her: 'Look I might be able to convert you' - was inexcusable. Once rejected, the texter had allegedly indulged in vengeful bullying of Fletcher, which, if less florid than anything that might routinely be meted out to a blameless grandfather by a pair of overpaid BBC presenters, was none the less disturbing and unpleasant, until it was stopped.

Still, it is being asked why justice would not be satisfied by the sacking of this offender and some proportionate compensation for his victim, reflecting any career damage. Why will Ms Fletcher receive, instead, more than a gravely hurt soldier whose injuries will not only destroy a military career and last a lifetime, but require physical support and equipment?

All of which could, unlike a young woman's recovery from unwanted textual advances, be costed with some accuracy.

Ms Fletcher's response, which might, perhaps, have been expressed in a manner less likely to hurt the feelings of injured veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, was that 'soldiers sign up knowing there is a possibility they could be injured or killed in a war zone. I didn't sign up to suffer the abuse or harassment I have suffered'.

Moreover, the fact that the MoD pays out insulting lump sums to the mutilated (in addition to guaranteed income payments) is surely not an argument for a parallel downgrading of compensation in civil cases. Perhaps, rather than cavil about the size of Fletcher's award, its critics should intensify their campaign for improved payments to the militarily injured, like the double amputee, Marine Ben McBean, who was offered £161,000 after losing an arm and a leg. In fact, had her case been heard in peacetime, rather than between flights returning a succession of injured or dead combatants from Afghanistan, one can imagine widespread sympathy for Fletcher, rather than her vilification as the latest, blondest betrayal of the military covenant.

It did not help that the announcement of Ms Fletcher's compensation followed immediately upon a mysterious, £280,000 out-of-court settlement between the Metropolitan Police and the senior Asian policeman Tarique Ghaffur, whose torments appeared to have been self-inflicted, if not completely non-existent. What, exactly, was the money for? Scotland Yard did not apologise for anything and, for his part, Ghaffur withdrew allegations which, until last week, had not only terminated his career but deterred unnumbered others from joining the police.

It was only four months ago that Ghaffur suddenly staged a mesmerising press conference, in which he declared that his career had been ruined by racist bosses, principally Sir Ian Blair. After the conference, the chairman of the Met's Black Police Association said: 'Racism, both institutional and individual, still continues within the Met. In fact, it has not improved that much since the Macpherson report.'

With one exception. If we are to believe Ghaffur, the racism in his case has now entirely evaporated. Though he is now pledged to silence, a statement from the Met, which attracted strikingly less interest than the officer's defiant press conference, stated that 'Mr Ghaffur has withdrawn the proceedings and his claims that Sir Ian and Mr Bryan acted in a racist or other discriminatory way towards him'. As for the Met, it would pay Ghaffur almost £300,000, it acknowledged his important service, and recognised 'the hurt which he has felt over the past 18 months'.

And that was that. If Ghaffur failed to extract the £1m or so he was initially reported to be seeking in compensation, his pay-off - for nothing - must still have brought cheer to the ever-lengthening procession of discrimination claimants. While some have been inclined to blame Ghaffur for staining the reputation of the Met, more opprobrium, surely, should attach to the police for allowing the case to end in the worst possible way, with the appearance of a cover-up, a payment of public money to a man who has damaged this public service and, perhaps worst of all, a signal that, even if you have no evidence for the charge, it is always worth accusing your employers of discrimination. In this generous climate, the most baseless complaint may reap handsome dividends from an employer keen to avoid protracted proceedings and, even, an accompanying acknowledgement of hurt which formalises the complainant's victimhood.

From the public's point of view, of course, the case only deepens a growing mistrust of both compensation claimants and a system that offers sums that go well beyond repairing career damage and punishing offenders. If it was difficult to understand why L/Br Fletcher required £30,000 for injured feelings, it will be that much harder to take such hurt seriously now that the once talkative Ghaffur claims to be similarly afflicted.

In the unlikely event that cash can assuage painful feelings, it is surely time that tribunals began using some more transparent, scientific method when allocating this form of comfort. There would be no need for anything as complicated as Jeremy Bentham's hedonic calculus, in which he worked out the total pain or pleasure produced by an act.

A society that accepts the MoD's table of limb and organ prices should be able to tolerate a similarly robust tariff for the valuation of unhappiness. How much, to the nearest penny, does it hurt to endure a suggestive text message? How much does it hurt to be Mr Ghaffur? Not half as much, perhaps, as his case hurts us.

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