A MINING union condemned the government's refusal to settle compensation claims for knee injuries without going through a gruelling court case.

Last month the Argus - which is leading the campaign for former pitmen to be paid - published an open letter from Mervyn Robbins, 68, urging the government to consider discussing the claim before proceeding with expensive court action.

He wrote: "We're all ex-miners and we're all suffering with terrible knees - it's obvious there's a link. You cannot just refuse to see that."

But Malcolm Wicks, the science and innovation minister at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), said it would "not be right to establish a compensation scheme for former miners with knee injuries without first having liability clearly established against it."

Bleddyn Hancock, from Nacods, the union leading the campaign, said: "This is just what they did on the miners chest complaints case. They don't seem to have learnt a thing."

Mr Hancock said that he understood that the DTI would not want to pay out without first establishing that it was liable. But he said it wasn't necessary to go through an expensive court case to prove this.

"We believe there is already enough evidence to show that they are liable for these injuries," he said. "A court judgement is not the only way to prove that.

"What they are saying is 'we don't care about that, we are not going to sit down and sort it out - we're going to drag it out for years at huge cost to the tax payer."

Nacods will next month attempt to win an order to cap the costs of the coming court case.