David Cameron today took an axe to job-destroying compensation laws and vowed to make 2012 the year when "we kill off the health and safety culture for good".
Writing exclusively in today's Evening Standard, he said that in future people should take more responsibility for their own safety.
He also announced a string of measures to stop "speculative health and safety chancers and those who leech off good businesses".
His attack on the compensation culture includes extending a cap on lawyers' fees in personal injury claims of less than £25,000.
The Government will also abolish laws that automatically hold employers responsible when someone gets hurt, even when an employee has flouted company rules. The Prime Minister branded health and safety litigation an "albatross around the neck of British businesses".
He wrote: "I want 2012 to go down in history not just as Olympics year or Diamond Jubilee year but the year we get a lot of this pointless time-wasting out of the British economy and British life once and for all."
His action was not down to the well-known but trivial cases of pupils being ordered to wear goggles to play conkers, he said, but an annual financial cost of billions to protect against litigation that is crushing businesses.
"Every day they battle against a tide of risk assessment forms and face the fear of being sued for massive sums," he said.
Major insurance companies will be asked to attend a Downing Street summit to set out what the industry is doing to avoid "insane levels of compliance".
The Prime Minister said it would require everyone to take more responsibility and "a change in
the national mind-set".
