Solicitors have been ordered to pay back tens of millions of pounds from the profits they made by handling compensation claims for sick miners.

The clawback, which will save the Government an estimated £100 million, comes after a High Court ruling that lawyers have been paid too much for processing claims.

Some law firms that grew rich on the proceeds of the £7.5 billion scheme, set up to compensate miners with chronic chest disease, face a loss of several million pounds.

The judgment by Mrs Justice Swift represents a significant victory for the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), which has responsibility for the liabilities of the former British Coal. The DTI had appealed against the level of costs it was being forced to pay solicitors for each claim settled under a fast-track procedure which was introduced in 2005. This was designed to speed up the settling of respiratory claims, many of which were taking several years to complete with the result that thousands of former miners died before they received any damages.

Claimants who take the fast-track option — usually those with less severe conditions such as bronchitis — have a spirometry test but do not have a full medical assessment.

For widows and other relatives making claims on behalf of deceased miners, the fast-track process removed the need to pass a rigorous testing of their eligibility.

The streamlined process involved less work for solicitors, who typically need to spend a maximum of seven hours working on each fast-track claim.

For their time they were being paid £1,769 plus VAT for each deceased claim and £1,561 for each live claim.

Those costs have now been cut to £1,192 and £1,103 respectively, which is still higher than damages paid to 70,000 former miners who brought claims under the coal health scheme.

The reductions are particularly significant for big firms that registered tens of thousands of claims and have settled a large number of them £98m through the fast-track process.

In total, 133,981 live and deceased claims have been fast-tracked, ensuring the payment of £227 million in damages.

The DTI estimates that the total saving which it will make from the judge’s ruling over the lifetime of the fast-track scheme will be in the region of £99 million.

An estimated £25 million will be saved from claims which have not yet been settled, while the bulk of the money, £74 million, has already been paid to solicitors’ firms and must now be paid back.

It was disclosed last week that Jim Beresford, the senior partner at Beresfords, a Doncaster-based firm which had been paid £98 million by the DTI for its work on coal health claims, was Britain’s highest earning solicitor in 2005.

He paid himself £16.7 million — the equivalent of £45,000 every day — from his firm’s profits for that year, the bulk of it courtesy of the DTI.

Unless there is a successful appeal against the High Court ruling, Beresfords and other high-earning law firms, such as Thompsons and Raleys, will each be forced to write cheques to the Government for several million pounds. Mrs Justice Swift noted in her judgment that a detailed study of the time spent by solicitors on each coal claim “gives rise to the strong inference that the work has been significantly less onerous than had originally been anticipated”.

Her ruling was welcomed by Malcolm Wicks, the Energy Minister, who said it vindicated the department’s determination to pursuing the matter through the Court of Appeal.

“We have said all along that the fast-track approach we have implemented for the lung disease scheme should require significantly less input by solicitors and should therefore incur considerably reduced costs,” he said.

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