Third Parties (Rights against Insurers) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I wholeheartedly support the Bill, as does my party—or, at least, those members of my party who are aware of the Bill’s existence. It is an absolutely prime example of why the new procedure is very valuable and must be continued. Let us look at the Bill’s history, which has already been outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral. In 1998, the Law Commission published a consultation paper on reform of the 1930 Act. In July 2001 it published its report number 272, which stated at paragraph 1.7: ""Respondents to our consultation paper … overwhelmingly confirmed that the deficiencies of the 1930 Act were not merely theoretical but caused real hardship"." That should have been a signal for the Government to get moving on this. However, that is not what happened because, in accordance with the usual practice, a draft Bill was attached to the report. The proposals in the report were non-controversial, there is no record of any objections by insurance companies and, in any case, the parties who will suffer most from the reform are lawyers who, as a result of this Bill, will have to appear in only one case rather than two. It would have been reasonable to assume that a Bill to give effect to the Law Commission’s report would have been enacted within a year or two of the report being published. However, it is now eight and a half years since its publication—a blatant example of the difficulty in getting Bills such as this through your Lordships’ House. As a result, I am a very strong supporter of the new procedure, which I certainly hope will make it possible to get relatively simple and uncontroversial Bills such as this one through your Lordships’ House in a much shorter time and without taking up time that might be committed to other business. I am grateful for the time and effort that the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs put into working on the new procedure when she was our own Cathy Ashton. This is the second Bill under the new procedure. The first was the Perpetuities and Accumulations Bill, which has now been enacted. That produced some interesting but rather arcane discussion as to whether the perpetuity period should be 100 years, 125 years or without a time limit. Nevertheless, that was sorted out and the legislation got through. This Bill seems even more straightforward; it is quite possible that no one will put down any amendments to it and it will go straight to a Third Reading. I hope that that is true but, in any event, I think that any amendments are unlikely to stop the Bill getting through. I certainly have no intention of tabling any amendments. It is therefore with great pleasure that I support the Bill, which seems to be a simple, obvious and meritorious improvement to a minor problem of our legal system.