The incoming president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers has launched a stinging attack on the prime minister and insurance industry. Speaking at the APIL conference in Newport today, Karl Tonks accused insurers of creating a ‘dysfunctional’ system through third-party capture of people who would never otherwise make a claim.

He said insurance companies that used referral fees and then wondered why claims were rising were ‘as deluded as the chronic alcoholic who doesn’t seem to be able to understand why he keeps waking up with a headache’.

Tonks also accused insurance companies of slowing down the system and driving up costs by refusing to share information on fraudsters - claiming to have been told by one insurer that ‘it’s much better for us to run cases all the way and then get more costs back’. Tonks said the path to compensation for victims of industrial disease was ‘littered with broken promises’ and accused insurers of accepting premiums with little or no prospect of ever paying claims.

The time was right, he added, for a fund of last resort for industrial disease sufferers to track down insurers and an employers’ liability insurance bureau. ‘This is the industry’s corporate responsibility and insurers individually and collectively need to step up, accept their responsibility for this scandal and put it right.’

Tonks then turned his attention to prime minister David Cameron in the wake of his attack on the health and safety ‘monster’ and plans to remove red tape announced earlier this year. The new president said the relaxing of health and safety legislation would have both a social and financial cost and ‘take us back to a bygone era, where children were sent up chimneys and people lost limbs with no recourse and no criticism of irresponsible employers’.

Tonks said APIL would continue to argue that government reforms in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders bill were unfair on claimants.

He added there is ‘much to be fought for’ over the detail of qualified one-way costs shifting and Part 36, and argued that the government’s reliance on people taking out before-the-event insurance will create a two-tier division between those who can afford cover and those who cannot.

He added: ‘[Firms] need to think differently about risk, prospects of success and affordability of cases. Yet this work cannot start until the government, with care and proper thought, fulfils its responsibility to finish the job and communicate the rules.’ The conference, due to finish tomorrow, was missing two of its main speakers after justice minister Jonathan Djanogly cancelled his appearance earlier this week and Lord Justice Jackson withdrew because of ill health.