While I feel deeply sorry for Luke Ratcliff, 23, the paralysed ex-student who this week had his £1 million compensation award withdrawn, I can't see that the Court of Appeal judges had any choice.

If they had allowed the award to stand, it would have gone against all natural justice and common sense. The compensation industry has been thriving in this country in the last couple of years. If this award had not been overturned, the doors would have been thrown wide open.

Four years ago Mr Ratcliff and two friends, after having a few drinks, climbed over a 6ft boundary wall and dived into an open-air college pool which had been shut for the winter. Mr Ratcliff hit his head on the bottom of the pool and is now paralysed for life.

The High Court originally ruled, against the agricultural college, that it should pay him £1 million - even allowing for the award being reduced by 40 per cent to take into account his contributory negligence.

Now, though, the Court of Appeal has decided that he was not drunk, knew the risks, and was wholly to blame for what happened. So it has said that he is not entitled to the damages.

That must be a terrible blow to a young man who was relying on that money to buy the care he will need for the rest of his life. He and his family must be devastated. But for the judges to have let the award against the college stand would have been to agree that it was somehow to blame for the accident, and it wasn't.

Luke Ratcliff is a victim of his own foolhardy behaviour and has now learned, in the most savage way possible, that people who make terrible mistakes for which nobody else is responsible must pay for them themselves.

That said, I hope and trust that the health and welfare services will do their utmost to make his life as comfortable and fulfilling as possible. It's up to society as a whole to care for those who fall upon grim times, even if it is self-inflicted.

But it isn't up to individuals or organisations to be forced to foot a huge compensation bill by wrongly having even a part of the blame apportioned to them.

Enjoy Mike Priestley's Yorkshire Walks

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.