Compensation Bill [HL]

That is not my understanding of how it would work. The advice I have been given is that it would not work in that way and it could not be defined quite like that. Committee is where we can come back and look at things again, but that is not how I think it would work. We have gone into the world of statutory duty in part because of the Tomlinson case. It is important to realise that that case was not about statutory duty in a direct sense; it involved cases around negligence because they were appropriate in that case. What we have done is to go back to the House of Lords judgment and say that we will look at negligence issues. The noble Lord does not like Clause 1 at all, so I would be nervous about trying to make it even bigger or to constrain the courts even further, which is why I want to leave it exactly as it is.