Compensation Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. I agree with his sentiment on his latter point, and I will give as much information as I possibly can to the Committee. I make no apology for trying to get this Bill on the statute book as quickly as possible to address the concerns that we have, hence trying to get a lot of this work done in parallel and hence wishing to keep noble Lords informed. The noble Lords, Lord Hunt and Lord Goodhart, in particular will find that messages are flying to their offices as we speak to try to get dates in the diary when I can go through the government amendments in plenty of time to be ready for Report, and hopefully to prevent either noble Lord needing to put down their own amendments if I have already covered the point. That would save all of us a great deal of work. I have met Neelie Kroes, and I am very impressed with her. We have invited her to visit us here to discuss a number of issues, not least liberalisation in legal services, as she is very interested in what we have been doing in the UK on that. We will be able to pick up those points with her. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, that this issue has not been picked up by the European Union. That is why I was keen to talk to my international officials about ways in which, particularly around the services directive, we might be able to look at this question so that it does not translate across into other parts of the European Union. We recognise the increasing development of operation between us and other European states on a whole range of things to do with civil law. That is a critical part of it. Under the Finnish presidency, which begins in July, we will also have a review of the Hague programme, which is an opportunity to look at all the civil law provisions that were agreed under the Dutch presidency to see whether they are operating effectively and whether we need to look at particular issues. I have already begun discussions with my Finnish counterparts over the weekend at the last Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting. The issue about the ambulance outside the accident and emergency unit is important. One of the underlying issues in all of this work is about people’s interpretation of the credibility that those organisations or individuals have, because they link themselves in some vague or non-vague way with the public sector. In other words, if you are in, say, a hospital, a police station or a school, you might believe that credibility is being given to the operation of individuals or organisations. We must look seriously at that because a false impression might be given to people at their most vulnerable point and we need to avoid that at all costs.