One three year old boy strikes another 11 times with a metal bar, leaving the victim toddler covered in blood and in need of stitches. Should the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority pay out?

Yes, the Tribunals Service ruled earlier this month, and probably rightly, too. Perhaps I should reconsider the forgiveness I have since freely extended to my younger brother for that nasty incident, circa 1969, which saw him bounce a half-brick off my bonce, resulting in a wound that also had to be sewn up.

On the other hand, it was just a little bit cheeky for Sajad Suleman to sue MI5 for £365,000, after the Funny People turned him down for a vacancy as a mobile surveillance officer.

The partially-paralysed British-Asian former bus driver’s case was thrown out after he admitted applying for a post that obviously required full mobility, at a time when he could not move his hands, fingers, arms, elbows, shoulders, hips, knees, feet or toes.

However, the spooks did say that they encouraged applications from ethnic minority and disabled candidates. And getting rejected knocked the poor bloke’s confidence so badly that he was unable to apply for other jobs.

In principle, the idea that compensation should be available for those subjected to negligence, criminality or discrimination seems equitable enough. If nothing else, it is a useful means of ensuring that employers stick to the health and safety rulebook, even where it costs them money to do so.

Sure, there will inevitably be plenty of chancers out there, and a whole new industrial sub-sector of ambulance-chasing ‘where there’s blame there’s a claim’ lawyers ready to egg them on. But periodic insistence in the tabloid press that Britain is in the grip of something called ‘compensation culture’ have yet to be substantiated.

The problem comes when you try to make a compensation system work in practice. How does injury to feelings compare to a broken leg? How many wrongful arrests equals one unlawful killing? Unless such a yardstick can be developed, doesn’t the whole thing degenerate into a farcial lottery?

Thus there was widespread moral outrage when Colin Stagg – the man fitted up by the cops for the murder of Rachel Nickell – was awarded £706,000 for the 13 months he spent in custody and the years of subsequent speculation that he was not entirely innocent. The sum was unfavourably contrasted to the £90,000 Ms Nickell’s son got for the trauma of witnessing the killing of his mother.

But a pay-out of £4.3m for Ben Collett, a Manchester United hopeful felled by a high tackle in his first game for the reserves, was generally regarded as equitable, in view of the loss of a potentially promising career.  Everything depends on how you do the maths, and soccer stars earn more than council flat losers.

That brings me to the news that the family of Jean Charles de Menezes has reached an out of court settlement with Scotland Yard. The Brazilian electrician, readers will certainly recall, was shot dead by the Metropolitan Police at Stockwell tube station in 2005, after being mistaken for a terrorist.

It seems that the compensation in this case was £100,000 or so. That’s just a quarter of the £400,000 that Sir Ian Blair – boss of the Met at the time of the execution – picked up last year after resigning from the job after falling out with Boris Johnson.

The reason for the stinginess? The de Menezes family are just poverty-stricken favela dwellers who can probably live the life of Riley indefinitely on the back of one hundred thousands of our British pounds.

If Britain really has become a compensation culture, someone obviously forgot to tell the de Menezes’ lawyers.

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