Civil Liability Bill [HL]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 15 to 20 and to explain why leaving out the word “psychological” benefits the Bill. As currently drafted, the Bill captures soft tissue injury and minor psychological injury only. If a claimant sustained a whiplash injury and, say, a bruise on their knee at the same time in an accident, the bruised knee would not be captured by the definition, which is limited to neck, back and shoulder in the current Clause 1. Damages for the bruised knee would therefore fall outside the tariff damages but would remain compensatable under common law. As I said earlier, there is a great prize for simplicity here, for being able, as an honest and genuine litigant, to go to a web portal to fill a claim and have predictability about what you are going to get. We will no doubt discuss the tariff a lot later on today. By removing the word “psychological” we bring minor injuries into the tariff so that if you have an accident and get a set of minor injuries, which we loosely call whiplash injuries, but which include bruised knees, you know what you are going to get and there would be a simple web way of doing it. We have tried to do that, and that is the sole reason for removing “psychological”. It would mean that injuries without the word “psychological” include psychological injuries. In fact, the definition I referred to earlier on the pre-action protocol for small bodily injury claims specifically includes psychological injuries. I think I have made the point.