Slowly but surely, light is beginning to pierce the murk of a potentially epic scandal involving £7.5 billion of tax-payers’ money. Its capacity to shock is likely only to grow. The report published yesterday by Malcolm Wicks, the Energy Minister, into the misuse of compensation money allocated to ailing miners only came into being thanks to stories broken by The Times. Its contents are both encouraging and disappointing. But this is only the beginning of the official reckoning.

There are two sides to this story of a well-meaning scheme to ease the retirement of miners whose underground working lives left them with blackened lungs and pulverised hands. Both sides have combined to allow the initiative to spiral out of control. First, the exploitation: the original forecasts for the scheme, set up in 1999, envisaged it costing £1 billion. Yet legal fees alone are now expected to cost £1.6 billion. Yesterday’s report, by Stephen Boys Smith, a former Home Office official, concluded that the vast majority of claims had not required the help of lawyers at all. In other words, solicitors have been creaming money from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) — and from taxpayers. Such claims are likely to make up a quarter of the final public bill.

There is another, more pernicious way in which some solicitors, and the mining unions they work alongside, have sought to enrich themselves. They deducted up to a fifth of the value of miners’ compensation payments for “fees and services”, even though the DTI had pledged already to cover such costs. Slices of that were handed to the National Union of Mineworkers and the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Money was also deducted for past union membership dues — again, an unnecessary requirement for claiming compensation. The Boys Smith report urges that this money, at least £50 million, be reimbursed to the miners if they were not told they could file claims elsewhere free of charge. The Law Society needs government help for this to happen swiftly.

The other side of the story is one of official haplessness. The DTI con- cocted a scheme of quite unnecessary complexity and reach. Officials grossly underestimated the number of likely claims, which now stands at 770,000. They had little hope of controlling payments to the 700 different legal firms they agreed to refund for every claim settled, a virtual invitation to fraud. And they were slow to switch to a less bureaucratic fast-track system.

There are also concerns about the Boys Smith report itself. Although it was set up as an external inquiry, and Mr Boys Smith came from across Whitehall, his two colleagues on the three-man team were both serving in the DTI. This offers little confidence that the report was as searching into DTI mistakes as it might have been. It feebly declares that the origins of the compensation scheme are too complex to delve into. A more extensive and independent inquiry is essential.

Until then, the case is subject to myriad continuing investigations. The Serious Fraud Office has taken over criminal inquiries from South Yorkshire Police. There are three separate legal investigations, one by the Law Society and two in the High Court. While these are pursued, men who spent six-hour shifts kneeling in sludge or cold water, breathing in coal dust and numbing their fingers on heavy machinery, wait for money that could help to make their lives a little easier.