My Lords, I am unused to getting such unanimous support from all sides of the House. I am grateful for the interventions from my noble friends Lord Lester, Lord Faulks and Lord Marks and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. As has been pointed out, we are being asked here whether there should be provision in the Bill requiring the court to strike out actions that do not meet certain thresholds, unless the interests of justice require otherwise.
The noble Baroness has made clear that the intention underlying the amendment is to make the law as clear as possible for the ordinary citizen. We share that aim, and have tried as far as possible to make the Bill accessible and readily understandable to those who may need to refer to it. However, the provision that she proposes is simply unnecessary, and could itself cause confusion and unnecessary cost.
As the Government have made clear in previous debates on this point, the courts already have a power in Rule 3.4 of the Civil Procedure Rules that permits them to strike out all or part of a claim where there are no reasonable grounds for bringing it or they consider it to be an abuse of process. The courts are very familiar with that power and we have no doubt that they will use it more often in defamation cases once the new higher threshold of serious harm is in place.
The noble Baroness expressed concern that the Civil Procedure Rules were couched in permissive rather than mandatory terms. We do not consider there to be anything in this point. We see no reason why a court would allow a case to continue if the threshold test were not met.
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In speaking to an amendment on this issue in Committee, the noble Baroness referred to the fact that my noble friend Lord Lester included a similar provision in his Private Member’s Bill on defamation. However, as my noble friend has just pointed out, by introducing the serious harm test in Clause 1 we have simply taken a different approach to achieve the same result. We have chosen to make a substantive change to the law rather than a procedural one, but the result is the same: if the court decides that the serious harm test is not met, it will use its power under Rule 3.4 to strike it out.
We believe that that is perfectly clear and that there is no need to create a new strike-out power, which could itself create confusion by largely duplicating the existing power. The amendment would also mean that the court had to assess whether the serious harm test had been met in every case, regardless of whether that was a matter of dispute. That would be unduly burdensome on both claimants and the courts.
Finally, I emphasise again what my noble friend Lord Ahmad said in the previous debate: that we are making progress in relation to our proposals on early resolution procedures. We will be bringing proposals before the Civil Procedure Rule Committee shortly to enable key issues to be brought before the court at the earliest possible stage. We will also be encouraging the courts to be more proactive in managing cases to ensure that a tight grip is kept on cases that proceed to trial. I assure the noble Lords that we are committed
to addressing these issues and will ensure that appropriate provisions are in place for when this legislation comes into force. I hope that on that basis and on the overwhelming arguments deployed from all sides of the House, the noble Baroness will withdraw this amendment.