The answer to both those questions is yes. An important concession was made in the House of Lords to extend the amount of time for testing, so that there is more time in which to make sure that the portal has been properly tested by, among others, the judiciary.
Part 2 of the Bill relates to the discount rate, and results from a very sudden change in the way in which compensation was paid to catastrophically injured victims. After 16 years in which the discount rate was set at a positive 2.5%, the last Lord Chancellor but one decided to reduce it to minus 0.75%, which radically changed what happens when someone is allocated a lump sum.
Let me remind the House of the formula that is applied. If, Mr Deputy Speaker, you were attempting to receive compensation for a projected 10 years of life, you were seeking £100,000 of care costs for each of those years, and inflation was, for the sake of argument, zero, you would receive only £1 million to cover you for your 10 years of projected life. Obviously, if inflation was higher, the real-terms increase in your care costs would mean that you would have to be afforded more, and the calculation that would need to be made in the awarding of the money would be how much of a return you could reasonably expect to receive for your money. If you could reasonably expect to receive a higher return for your £1 million, it might be possible to cover you for more years, and vice versa: fewer years would mean a lower return. The discount rate has been applied since the 1970s by the judiciary, and since 2001 by the Lord Chancellor, to enable the courts to calculate the fair rate to apply to a lump sum in the case of catastrophic injury. That sudden change from 2.5% to minus 0.75% meant that in the single year 2017-18 the NHS faced £404 million of costs. Projected forward at that rate, there are potentially not just hundreds of millions, but billions, of pounds of costs attached to the public
Exchequer and through insurance premiums on the public themselves. Therefore, through the pre-legislative scrutiny conducted by the Justice Committee and the Government Actuary’s Department we have attempted to strike a proportional balance between the interests of often very vulnerable, catastrophically injured victims and those of society as a whole.