Compensation Bill [HL]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, was kind but entirely inaccurate to attribute this amendment to me. It has been the common cry of many tens of thousands of people for quite a long time that it should be possible to say sorry. That sentiment is expressed mostly by people who wished that other people had felt able to say sorry to them. I think that this is terribly important for three reasons. First, it is how this society should be. Saying ““sorry”” to share a person’s grief and pain when you have been involved in the incident that has led to that grief and pain is a way in which we should feel able to relate to each other. It is an ordinary, proper, human expression of belonging to the same community and, in a very basic way, we should seek to encourage it. Secondly, it is good for the person who is said ““sorry”” to. That is an ordinary matter of personal experience in many different events. If someone says sorry to you, you feel that in some way the burden of grieving has been taken away from you personally, that there is an understanding that this has hurt you, and that there is the willingness to acknowledge that such incidents should be prevented as far as possible. I do not think that guilt comes into the word ““sorry”” in any way—there is no implicit admission of guilt and none should be assumed. Thirdly, it is extremely good for the person who says sorry. I illustrate the last two points by the experience of my young cousin’s wife, who died shortly after childbirth as a result of a hospital-acquired infection which was not detected. She was sent home with the infection. It was not diagnosed by the GP and she died shortly after she returned to hospital. What hurt my cousin most was that the hospital would not say sorry. He believed—not entirely wrongly—that that meant that the hospital would never truly start to look for ways in which to ensure that such cases do not happen in future. It is understood and accepted that medicine is not perfect—that you cannot always spot such things, that you may mistake them for something else. There is generally an acceptance that the medical profession should not be persecuted for that, that perfection should not be assumed and that sometimes things will just happen. But the idea that you should not be said ““sorry”” to, the idea that something going wrong should not lead to that organisation openly and clearly seeking ways for that not to happen again, is terribly painful and unnecessary. It has clearly and formally reached that state of affairs in motor insurance, as the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, mentioned. In my personal experience, and in frequent anecdote in medical cases, it is clear that saying sorry has been discouraged. We need to do something about that. I lay no claim to how this amendment should be worded—I am not a lawyer. I do not want to put people who have been injured in a position where their rights are diminished by any such clause. But I think that we need to move the basis on which we run this society back towards saying sorry as the usual, honest and ordinary thing to do, irrespective of fault.