 James Hand, writing in the "Journal of Law and Society", observed that sensationalist stories about compensation awards "evidently make for good copy; national newspaper articles concerning the compensation culture have increased exponentially since the mid 1990s," while statistics conversely demonstrated "a broad decline" in the number of claims during the same period.Research published in 2006 examined the data held by the Compensation Recovery Unit, a government agency which enabled the state to recover from tort damages any social security benefits paid as a result of an accident or disease.This found "no evidence that the tort system has been flooded with an increasing number of personal injury claims in recent years" and concluded that "the number of claims [had] been relatively stable since at least 1997–1998," the first year for which statistics were available.