My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord McKenzie for laying out the case in his customarily lucid and reasonable style. I strongly support Amendment 46, in his name, which wisely would require the Secretary of State to set out his plans to establish further analogous schemes within a year.
We will come back to the Minister’s refusal to contemplate doing that in a moment, but I will just comment on Amendment 47, concerning the Armed Forces, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord James of Blackheath. He has raised a massively important issue. Our concern has to be not only for sailors, for people doing highly skilled labouring jobs in naval dockyards and for other members of the armed services, but for people who could well have been directly employed by government in a whole host of other fields in publicly owned facilities of one kind or another, including of course civil servants. The Government self-insure, and there must be an employer’s liability in that situation. I cannot see how it could possibly be otherwise. Perfectly understandably, the Government do not go to the insurance market to take out employer’s liability insurance but absorb the risk themselves.
I can well understand that the Ministry of Defence has form and has sought, over many years, to resist what many very well informed people consider to be well founded claims for compensation against the Ministry of Defence. It digs in and goes into the trenches. However, there must be a strong case—not only a moral case, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, very powerfully suggested, but, I would have thought, a strong legal case. The difficulty, presumably, is that potential claimants do not have the confidence to take on the MoD because it has infinite resources with which to defend itself in those trenches.
The noble Lord, Lord Alton, compared the Minister to William Wilberforce. The persuasive powers and techniques of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, are legendary, but I would join him more prosaically in simply encouraging the Minister not only to receive a report on the important meeting that is due tomorrow but to pursue this matter strenuously. I do not know whether the Bill would permit an amendment to be incorporated that was designed to achieve the purposes of the noble Lord, Lord James of Blackheath, with this amendment. However, I hope the Minister will do his very best to ensure that some such amendment is included.
This brings me back to my own amendments, which the Minister resisted despite saying that he was sympathetic to their purpose. How could he not be considering that he went so far at Second Reading? I assume that if the department was going to do the work to produce the estimates document to which I and others have drawn attention, it must be because it sees that there is a strong case for establishing other schemes in the future for other long-latency asbestos-related diseases.
I now know that this is his technique in debate, but the Minister has set up another Aunt Sally, as my noble friend Lord McKenzie spotted. He sought to interpret the purport of my amendments and my remarks as being that we have to stretch the mesothelioma scheme to encompass the payment of compensation in relation to these other diseases. That, of course, is not at all what I said. Amendment 40 would insert,
“or any other scheme established under this legislation”.
Amendment 45 says:
“The Secretary of State may by regulation establish other schemes in relation to other … diseases”.
I am not at all saying that the mesothelioma scheme should be expanded, inflated or stretched to do what he said. I am saying that, to the extent that the Bill clearly does not confer the powers requisite, we ought to amend it so that it would be possible to establish other schemes analogous to the diffuse mesothelioma payment scheme in future. This does not cost the Treasury a penny, and I cannot see what the conceivable difficulty should be. The Minister has given no reason why this should not be done.