Health and Safety: Common Sense Common Safety

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Young, on what I found to be an exceptionally interesting and thought-provoking speech. One hopes that the Government will lose no time in implementing his recommendations. The Motion refers to both health and safety legislation and the compensation culture. Of the two, it is really the latter that is the villain of the piece; without it, schools, local authorities and so on would not be nearly so zealous in implementing health and safety legislation to the letter, and even gold-plating it, for fear of the financial consequences should anything go wrong. With that in mind, it is right today to pay tribute to the late Michael Cocks, Lord Cocks of Hartcliffe, whom some of your Lordships will remember. He had previously been a Member of Parliament for Bristol South. Almost 15 years ago, on 20 December 1995, he introduced a debate highlighting the malign consequences of the litigious society that was taking root in Britain just as America was trying belatedly to curb its own. Lord Cocks, who emphasised that he was not being party political—this most surely is not a party-political matter—was chiefly concerned about the threat that this compensation culture posed to the NHS and to the medical profession generally but, of course, his words apply equally to businesses, particularly small businesses that do not run to a compliance department and whose directors or partners are far too busy running their businesses to take time off to spend a day or more fighting accusations of mis-selling or, more often, discrimination and so find it cheaper to settle out of court, even though they may be totally innocent, as the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, pointed out. In the main, such people cannot afford the understandably high premiums now demanded for litigation protection. I was at that debate, and what was surprising and disappointing was the lukewarm response of both the Government and the then Opposition to Lord Cocks’s speech. Clearly, at that time, Britain had not learnt from the transatlantic experience and did not realise that the introduction of the no-win no-fee system, among other things, would encourage ambulance-chasers to flourish and the British public to become more and more litigious, thus making life much tougher for the medical profession and for honest, well run businesses, which constitute the great majority, as well as for a small minority that behave badly in one way or another. In his speech, Lord Cocks quoted, in col. 1612, a headline in the Sunday Times of 12 November 1995, which read, ““Huge legal suits threaten US firms. Litigate and make your fortune””. Indeed, we were just starting to hear about McDonald’s customers on the other side of the pond being awarded a small fortune for having been served coffee that was rather too hot and so forth. Now, it seems that litigants are making a small fortune on this side of the Atlantic. The Sunday Telegraph reported on 21 November that a 46 year-old woman had, in the space of 10 years, won half a million pounds from a variety of employers, having never held a job for more than 26 months. Almost the worst feature was a payment of nearly £21,000 for ““hurt feelings””. Compare this award with the generally much smaller amounts awarded to our soldiers seriously wounded in Afghanistan. One has no quarrel with damages awarded by a tribunal for proven, properly calculated loss of earnings, but quite disproportionate awards for alleged injured feelings are another matter altogether. Consider a case, justifiably slated in the press and on local radio a year or two ago, where a woman in a headscarf applied for a job with a small hairdresser’s near King’s Cross. She was told, ““If we give you this job, you realise you’ll have to remove your headscarf while working—not while travelling to and from the shop—since our policy is that our customers should be able to see our various assistants’ beautiful heads of hair, made even more beautiful by the skills of our salon””. The applicant refused to contemplate doing so and sued for discrimination. Despite the tribunal acquitting the hairdresser of discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, religion and so on, the applicant was none the less awarded £4,000 for hurt feelings. The ways of the law are weird and strange. Almost as curious is the case of a 19 year-old girl who had been working in a store for a year or so and applied for the job of manager. It was explained to her that a manager needed plenty of experience and the ability to deal with the unexpected and with a wide variety of people and that, regrettably, she was too young. She disagreed and took the matter to court; she was awarded several thousand pounds in compensation, a large proportion of which was, once again, for injured feelings. Naturally, in the whole spectrum of compensation culture, hurt feelings play a minor part, but the present state of affairs not only encourages people to magnify minor grievances that they might otherwise have shrugged off but encourages some people to try to get rich quickly by means of litigation. Some years ago, during the Major Administration, a Conservative Front-Bench spokesman in this House expressed the view that £1,000 should constitute the maximum award for injury to feelings, a proposition that I welcomed then and still endorse today. I am certain that most members of the public would endorse that view, too. I suggest, without much optimism, that the Government should give serious consideration to such a cap.