Lost Years, Real Justice -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

In 18 February 2026, The UK Supreme Court does what the law has miraculously avoided doing for decades and treats a child whose life was diminished as fully entitled to the profits that negligence robbed him of. In CCC v Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust ([2015] EWCA civ 388) the court decided that children can claim loss of earnings in their “lost years” which was effectively a reversal of Croke v Wiseman.

It was not a matter of technical bit-cleaning. It was rectification of a legal grey area that survived longer than it should have.

Children like this little boy, CCC, who was a victim of oxygen deprivation at birth in 2015 due to the hospital that failed him and his mum. That injury had reduced CCC’s life expectancy by 45%, to an estimated 29 years. The trust admitted fault. It was also agreed that, had it not been for his disability, CCC would probably have continued to live in this way and work until the age of 68 – earning a pension. However, lower courts adhering to the old principle established in Croke v Wiseman were unable to grant damages for 29-68.

It was that limitation which was at the core of the injustice. In a 4-1 ruling, the high court found that there was no legitimate legal basis for the previous ban. The judges dismissed the notion that a child’s future is too hypothetical to be taken into account. The modern courts, they said, do not shoot in the dark. This may be based on statistics, the family of claimants or expert contemporary actuarial tools such as the Ogden tables.

On 18 February 2026, Across all future claims for catastrophic paediatric injury how many you would receive in the United Kingdom. For the law can no longer sustain a framework in which adult and adolescent claimants would be entitled to recover damages for lost years under Pickett v British Rail Engineering Ltd whilst younger children might yet be refused the same principle just because they are younger.

That distinction was never principled. It was arbitrary.

By refusing to pretend age is an adequate justification for whether a ruined future is worth compensation. Mostly they understood that the point of damages is not to reward lost legal categories but to restore, as much as money can, what negligence destroyed. If the child would have worked and earned income had they not been harmed, then the loss is real even if the child cannot yet articulate that.

The strategic consequences are serious.

Initially, health facilities and the insurers of these establishments can expect to bear substantially higher exposure in catastrophic cases involving youngsters. That is not an anomaly. Which is the price we pay for acknowledging the total cost of preventable injury to our economy.

Second, others will have to take stricter actuarial and statistically based views in managing pediatric claims. The time for dismissing these losses as too ambiguous has passed.

Third, policymakers should examine the existing legal scheme to ensure that the compensation of children who are severely injured reflects a coherent set of rules in the law. If the goal is justice, the law shouldn’t turn on whether the victim was a child or a teenager when her mother made some sort of negligent mistake.

Reilly said the ruling is about more than one family’s case. It asks the judicial system to stop pretending that a shortened childhood also wipes out a shortened working life. It did not constitute a windfall from the Supreme Court. It restored logic. That is what justice looks like in negligence law, when it finally stops looking away.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia