I am very grateful to the noble Lord and am pleased to have given him the opportunity to make the speech that he wished he had made in supporting his amendment. Now that I have the noble Lord’s support, I can summarise my argument in relation to my amendment by saying that I am reinforced in the view that it would appear the common law is still developing. The Government’s wording in the draft Bill, and even the wording proposed in the noble Lord’s amendment—I sympathise with his attempt to try to make two subsections one subsection—broadly restricts the defence specifically in relation to the reporting of a dispute to which the claimant has to be a party. I did not understand that to be the common
law of England and I now have support for that view. If there was a justification and a necessity for this provision, I suspect that it arose from the way in which the clause was framed previously. For the reasons expounded by the noble Lord, Lord Lester, it is no longer necessary.
I hope that the Government will go away and think about that but if they insist on retaining this subsection in the Bill, I propose that we should delete the qualification of the dispute because it does not refer to the common law and is a restriction. I do not think that the Government intend to restrict this defence.