Government law reform advisers have recommended that the law which blocked compensation claims by people who lost relatives in the Hillsborough tragedy, nine years ago, should be changed.

The Law Commission said the current law was drawn "unnecessarily tightly" and produced "arbitrary results".

But it said any changes to the law would not retrospectively affect the families' claims.

From a wider point of view, it says one result may be higher motor insurance premiums.

After the 1989 disaster, in which 96 people died, many relatives of those killed and injured sued for the mental illnesses they developed as a result of the trauma.

Most, however, failed to obtain compensation because they had not been present and had only heard about the incident indirectly.

'More sympathetic'

The Law Commission has now recommended dropping the requirement that witnesses to a disaster should be "close in time and space" and see it at first hand.

The author of the commission's report, Professor Andrew Burrows, said the law needed to be less complicated and more sympathetic to the families involved.

"You end up with the law having to decide whether you had come along in a sufficiently near period of time," he said.

"The law is not saying you can recover damages just because you were upset ... there still needs to be a line between a psychiatric illness and mental distress."

The proposals, which apply only in England and Wales, come shortly after the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, reaffirmed his view that there should be no new inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster.
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