Compensation Bill [HL]

I shall speak to this question, because I think it is essential that the clause stand part. I have to confess that I am a little lost in all the talk about conditional fee arrangements because I thought they were in Clause 2. I am not sure why we are jumping ahead of ourselves and talking about rates of compensation and things that we have not discussed in Clause 1. I thought that the point of Clause 1 was to prevent the growth of the compensation culture. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, that that is the primary purpose of Clause 1. As he rightly said, if we do not reduce the compensation culture, business will suffer, as will education and children. More accidents will happen to people when they are older, because they will not have learned how to cope, they will be less able to travel and operate in the wider world and all sort of things like that. The consequences are quite large. It is a nice idea to fire this off to the Law Commission, the Law Society and others to be debated even further, but at this moment schools are cancelling trips. I have heard of a school scuba diving trip to the Middle East, which has been happening for years, being cancelled because the school does not know how to assess the risks. It decided it is safer to cancel. We can go on with anecdotal evidence—genuine anecdotes, not just invented stories. If we do not do something about it, there will be no activities left. Small groups cannot fund the insurance. Insurance companies are ramping up insurance costs as a result of all this. Unless something is clearly stated, we will not put a break on the compensation culture. It is all very well for noble and learned Lords to say that there is no need to worry because the Tomlinson case has proved that it is okay. But that has not filtered through to the general public, nor, I suspect, to the legal profession at large, particularly to solicitors’ firms where this is not their primary subject. Given the amount of legislation that pours out Parliament every year and the amount of case law that changes how common law and statute law develop, how can they be expected to keep up? So I do not see any problem at all with having Clause 1. The misconception is real. It is out there with the general public, lawyers and insurance companies, whether you like it or not. Why not restate the law in a precise way so that lawyers can see in one brief clause exactly what it is? The other challenge, apart from the weight of legislation, arises from our adversarial system. Whether you win a case depends how good your lawyer is. That can completely change what Parliament intended. If the party who wants to prosecute the case lines up a QC against the other party’s local county solicitor who has never come across such a case before, I know which side I would put my money on—except that I think it is probably illegal to bet on the outcome of cases. The breach of statutory duty is a useful measure that should be inserted into Clause 1. If we combined it with some notion of physical risk, the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, about meeting the standard duty of care means that you are not covering all the statutory duties in all the legislation out there but only those that refer to the standard of care that would be required for the particular activity that is risky or adventurous. Those proposals could usefully be incorporated in Clause 1. It would be a sad missed opportunity if this was to become a Bill merely about regulating ambulance chasers. We have a huge opportunity here to send out the message that we believe society and our children should have the chance to have some adventure and fun in life.