My Lords, I want to draw attention to one or two other passages in the Government’s response, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, referred in his excellent introduction. Two features caught my eye. One is in paragraph 45. The Justice Select Committee had drawn attention to quite strong representation for the Civil Procedure Rules to make it a requirement that PPOs be offered; its advice was against that, because it was reasonably clear that not every case made a PPO appropriate—one has to be selective; some cases are better suited than others. The point of mentioning that is that one could adopt the approach of amending Section 100 of the 2003 Act, which is the basis for the award of PPOs, to toughen up the requirement that they be offered in every case, but that is not what is being suggested and, I think, rightly so.
The other question is whether rules of court are best equipped to deal with the problem. That is why I draw attention to what is said in paragraphs 50 and 51 of the Government’s response. In passages that are written out in heavy print and underlined, they undertake to,
“investigate the quality and effectiveness of the advice currently available”,
with a view to endorsing,
“guidance on standard practice to ensure that claimants are properly informed”.
Will the Minister expand a little on what the Government had in mind in that passage? Was it guidance rather than amendments to the Civil Procedure Rules, guidance to lie alongside the Civil Procedure Rules or guidance which will inform the committees responsible for the revision of those rules?
What comes through from that and the following paragraph is that further investigation is in the mind of the Government. A little more information may be needed before the rules are revised in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has in mind. If the Minister could expand a bit on that, it would be very helpful.