Compensation Bill [HL]

My Lords, I entirely disagree with the amendment. Clause 1 is the heart of the Bill and the part in which I have most interest. The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, was right when he said that the Bill is largely in line with the present law. Grand Committee convinced me of that. The importance of the clause is not that it changes the law but that it prevents further change to the law. Someone who is responsible for planning the provision of an activity—often looking forward many years—can say, ““What I am doing fits with the law at the moment. I can be sure that the perception of the drift of liability and responsibility away from the citizen towards the providers of activities is not going to apply further in my case; and therefore I can reasonably say that this is an activity in which I wish to invest and in many cases which I wish to provide my livelihood over many years.””. This is a thoroughly desirable clause. I would like to declare an interest. I own a wood in Kent to which I allow the public access. I am conscious that people using this wood—which contains slippery and steep slopes and remnants of an old garden created by former Lord Chief Justice Jowett—could easily injure themselves. They could fall down some of the concrete constructions in the wood or some of the steep slopes. There are the ordinary dangers of access to a wood which is full of dead standing timber—as is required these days—left there to amuse the owls, woodpeckers and such. But at some stage this will fall down and if someone is underneath it will squash them. If I feel that this is something for which I am likely to find myself liable in due course—or that the law might drift in that direction when that unhappy event happens and I would be the one caught by that drift—I will let the wood go back to eight-foot brambles which is what it was when I bought it. And there will be no question of public access without severe lacerations—which will probably discourage anyone attempting it. It is common sense that people should be allowed to take ordinary risks and judge for themselves the ordinary risks attendant on rock climbing. As the noble Lord said, people know that a chunk of mountain may fall off higher up, knock you on the head and do you severe injury even if you have a decent rope, a decent helmet and a proper instructor. These things happen. It is not that we cannot deal with the current state of the law which is broadly fair. Nobody wants to find that the law has drifted while they were not looking and that they suddenly find themselves liable—or that, in looking ahead in the provision of an activity, it is likely to drift. That results in the gradual withdrawal of facilities and people taking action to avoid the possibility of the law changing to their disadvantage. It is entirely right that statute should state that there is a reasonable balance and that is where we want to keep it. We do not want the uncertainties of the way in which common law might develop under pressure from the Daily Mail and Daily Express.