Families lose legal fight over vCJD payouts

Families of victims of the incurable disease vCJD have lost a High Court challenge over what they claim is a "flawed" Government compensation scheme.

The action before Mr Justice Silber was led by Annie McVey, whose 15-year-old daughter Claire, from Kentisbury Ford, near Barnstaple, Devon, died from the human form of BSE – variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease – in 2000.

It had been argued on behalf of Mrs McVey and a number of other families that there was an "on-going failure" by the Government to rectify the complex scheme.

Dismissing the action in London yesterday the judge said the more he had read documents in the case "the more I have appreciated how tragic the consequences have been for the claimants' families of having a member with vCJD".

He added: "Although I am totally sympathetic to their present predicaments my duty is to apply legal principles."

Those principles, he announced, "have driven me to the conclusion that this claim must be dismissed".

During the recent hearing of the action Ian Wise, representing the families, said trustees put forward proposals to radically overhaul the scheme in 2006 which were rejected by the Secretary of State in June 2009.