Compensation Bill [HL]

I do not know whether this is sensible; it is for the lawyers to decide. Subsection (2) of this proposed new clause worries me. Listening to the lawyers, I think they have managed to obfuscate something which is not that difficult. The person on the Clapham omnibus would probably understand pretty well what Part 1 is trying to say. We seem to be going around the houses. It worries me that, given our adversarial system, if the defendant is not well off and is up against claims lawyers on the other side working on a no-win-no-fee basis, he may well be trying to defend himself. If he is attacked by a good, heavyweight lawyer, I am afraid to say that most of the time he is going to lose. He will be tied up in the kind of knots I have just heard being woven in a Gordian way by people who would probably rather see Clause 1 disappear. I do not think that subsection (2) is a good idea at all. The courts should be able to decide easily whether an activity was for the purpose of public benefit without the poor, non-qualified defendant having to do so when facing what possibly is a QC.