Compensation Bill [Lords]

I should start by declaring an interest, in that I still receive the occasional royalty for the books on this subject that I wrote several years ago. However, I am not a member of the Law Society or a barrister. I completely agree with the speeches by my fellow Constitutional Affairs Committee members, my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) and the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright). Perhaps my speech will be seen as a technical footnote to theirs. I want to concentrate on my worries about clause 1. Part 2 has been entirely justified by the tales that we have heard today about the extraordinary cases of claims farming in the mining areas. The problem with clause 1 concerns the perception that there is a high risk of being sued when it is not justified. I hope that the people on the other side of the debate who support clause 1 will accept that there are circumstances in which it is justified for one person to be sued by another. When one person is injured by another person’s foot, there should be a high risk of the person who did the injuring having to pay compensation. That is just and right; it also serves the social purpose of reducing the risk of unreasonable action causing harm. The perception arises from two sources—legal error and excessive litigation. I will deal with legal error in a moment, but everyone now seems to accept that there is no compensation culture in the sense that the number of claims being made in any part of society are rising fast—they are not. In fact, in most parts of the legal world the number of tort claims is falling. Interestingly, there is evidence that the number of claims must have risen rather dramatically between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, when the figures became more widely available—between the Pearson report and the time when national figures became available through the recovery unit. Oddly, during the period when the number of claims apparently increased, no one seemed to complain about the compensation culture, whereas in an era when the number of claims is falling, complaints about it are common.