Compensation Bill [HL]

I completely understand what the noble Lord says—I completely accept that such decisions are made. I used the example of reputational issues. It is another factor that people are concerned that their reputation does not suffer, and it is easier to pay up than be seen to have had a claim against them. In the work that I am undertaking I seek to take a step back from that and the actions of those who say, ““If you put in spurious claims, we will take this all the way through””. We have had a couple of cases recently when people have ended up going to prison because of making bogus claims. So we can deter people completely from doing that. What was interesting about Knowsley and the reduction of cases was that the word went out that it was not worth making a claim because you were not going to get anywhere. That was why the drop from 1,700 to 250 was so dramatic. I accept that in a sense, in a local authority area, there is a captive audience of people and you can do something in one big push; it was resource-intensive at the time, but it paid off handsomely. It is much more difficult if you are an individual organisation or business. I hope that through the steering group—working with DTI colleagues, who are also part of the group—we will set the tone. We need to get the message across so that people do not get claims that they should not, while recognising that, as the noble Viscount rightly said, you make a business decision at the end of the day as to what is most cost-effective in money and time. We want to prevent people even from having to get to the point of making that decision when the claim is not valid.