Compensation Bill [Lords]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend. I thank the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) for his work in Committee and his support on a number of issues. I congratulate Lord Hunt on his terrific victory on clause 2 in the other place, and I also thank the Minister for the way in which she and Baroness Ashton swallowed their pride and ended up welcoming the provision, which is great. In relation to the all-party campaign, I want to thank Ian Lewis, the director of the Campaign for Adventure, and Andrew Caplan, the legal adviser to the Scout Association, for their support. They made possible the contribution to the debate by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik), as well as that by the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Derek Wyatt), who cannot be here tonight. The only substantive point I want to make is that we have nearly got through the Hansard route what we would have liked to have seen on the face of the Bill—a slightly narrower definition of desirable activities and ““shall”” rather than ““may””. Looking back over the record, I see that the Minister said in Committee that desirable activities must involve an element of collective value, not just the trivial, tautological individual desire to do them, which would apply in every case. We therefore have some limitation on desirable activities. Her answer to me tonight made it fairly clear that the court would normally be expected to take clause 1 into account. The examples given by her and the Minister in the other place of the kind of cases in which it would not be taken into account were a long way from the voluntary, sporting, educational and other activities that the all-party campaign exists to protect, so we have almost achieved what we wanted in that regard. An awful lot of people are doing an awful lot of good in this country—the tens of thousands of scout masters and guide leaders, the huge numbers who work with young people in sports clubs, yacht clubs, canoeing clubs and more informal groups for hill walking, the teachers who take children out on school trips and so on. If the Bill stops the fatuous cases that we have seen in the lower courts over the past few years, including the one in Manchester, which I cited in my Second Reading speech, that took place during the Bill’s progress through the House of Lords—