Victims of Overseas Terrorism Bill [HL]

My Lords, the Bill addresses a real problem which the Government have addressed in other aspects of our lives: the idea that people caught up in terrorism should be compensated. It deals with a gap which we had not seen before. As the noble Lord, Lord Marsh, has said, I am afraid that the Government are once again being reactive; they have to be. We had not thought that terrorism would strike in this way or format. The noble Lord, Lord Brennan, has therefore come up with a solution. Whether it is the best solution conceivably available might be open to question, but it is the one now before us. The noble Lord deserves credit for bringing it forward now, in the face of absolutely nothing happening elsewhere—or, if not nothing, then at least not enough. Is it affordable? When he gave us a briefing on this, I asked the noble Lord whether he thought it was. He came up with the figure of £3 million, repeated today. If that is the case, it should be made available. Is the insurance industry as it stands capable of doing this? Probably not. If you have an exclusion against something which you think will probably not happen but could be very expensive—it is safe to say that insurers are there to make money—something else must happen to fill the gap. Normal policies will probably not provide for that. This scheme gives us a potential way of dealing with a problem. It is less a matter of asking the Government than of asking the Treasury Bench whether they think there is another way of doing it or whether the Government have any information about another way forward. If there is an objection to the scheme or a way of extending treaties overseas, or if it is reasonable to expect potentially poor countries to provide this degree of compensation, I would be interested to hear about it. I doubt there will be an objection, but it is just the kind of question I want to hear answered. If the Government cannot give us a compelling answer why the Bill is not needed, we should accept it or something like it. It gives us a last resort. What else could we do? We could adopt something totally unlinked to insurance, leaving it up to the Government. That is a possible answer. Unless we address this problem through some government scheme, however, we should look very hard at the Bill in front of us, or something very like it, and we should do so soon.