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Oral Answers to Questions
(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
We are bringing a tech revolution to the NHS to improve patient outcomes and reduce waste. Today I am delighted to announce the selection of the first batch of products under the accelerated access collaborative, as well as funding for tech test beds to ensure that more patients get faster access to the most effective innovations.
Scott Mann
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for his answer. Will he expand further on the recent announcement of the wave 2 test beds project and how it could deliver better outcomes for my residents down in Cornwall?
Matt Hancock
The tech test beds programme is about ensuring that we have units around the country that will support local collaborations between the NHS, tech companies and academia to harness new technologies right across the land, including—and no doubt—in Cornwall.
Julian Sturdy
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has so far declined to recommend the new drug Spinraza, despite its ability to transform the lives of patients such as my young constituent Matilda Jamieson, who suffers from type 3 spinal muscular atrophy. As NICE meets today to finalise the guidance, will my right hon. Friend assure me that he will work with the manufacturers, NHS England and NICE to ensure that patients such as Matilda can benefit from that drug?
Matt Hancock
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for making that case so powerfully. We work very closely with NICE, which is rightly the objective decision maker that makes recommendations for Ministers to follow about what drugs should and should not be accessed through the NHS. He makes the case very strongly.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
This question is about innovative technology in the health service. What is the Secretary of State saying today to scientists? For example, 97% of people from the Francis Crick Institute say that our science and our bioscience are in danger because of Brexit. What is he going to do about technology that is suitable for the health service?
Matt Hancock
The scientists, like me, want a Brexit that is based on a good deal for the UK, and that is what we are seeking to deliver. In any case, we have put more money into the science budget than ever before, so no matter what the outcome of the negotiations, there will be more support for science in Britain.
Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)
One of the innovative technologies is the new production and distribution system for flu jabs for the over-65s. Is the Secretary of State aware that this technology is breaking down? In my constituency and elsewhere, there are doctors and pharmacists who simply cannot get hold of stocks, which leads to potential pressures in hospitals. Will the Secretary of State investigate and take action if necessary?
Matt Hancock
Having a flu jab is incredibly important, and I hope that Members on both sides of the House have taken the opportunity to do so, including the right hon. Gentleman, with whom I enjoyed working for many years. We have a phased roll-out of the flu jab, making sure that we get the best flu jab most appropriately to the people who need it most, and of course we keep that under review.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)
Digital health tools, including decision-support software, have a great potential to increase the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of care for patients, and nowhere is that more important than in reducing antimicrobial resistance. Will my right hon. Friend respond to the points that we on the Health and Social Care Committee make in our report about the variation in roll-out, which is wholly unacceptable, and what measures will he take to make sure that it is clear where the responsibility for this lies?
Matt Hancock
I pay tribute to the Select Committee for the report on AMR that was published yesterday. Of course, digital tools such as the one that my hon. Friend mentions are important in making sure that we make the best use of antibiotics and counter antimicrobial resistance as much as possible.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)
If we have a “technological revolution”, in the words of the Secretary of State, surely that depends on capital investment, but that has been cut by £1 billion. For example, we have the lowest numbers of CT and MRI scanners on average in the OECD, hospitals are reliant on 1,700 pieces of out-of-date equipment, and the hospital repair bill now stands at £6 billion. If austerity has ended, can he tell us when this maintenance backlog will be cleared?
Matt Hancock
Unlike with the failed national programme for IT, we are delivering modern technology in the national health service. That is underpinned by a record commitment of £20 billion extra for the NHS over the next five years, accompanied by a long-term plan that will show how we will support the NHS and make sure that it is guaranteed to be there for the long term.
Jonathan Ashworth
But I asked the Secretary of State about capital budgets, not revenue budgets.
Innovative technology can play a role in prevention, but so do public health budgets. With health inequalities widening, infant mortality rising in the most deprived parts of the population, rates of smoking in pregnancy remaining higher than the EU average and child obesity levels getting worse, will the Secretary of State commit, alongside an investment in technology, to reversing the £700 million of cuts to public health, or is the reality that his promises on prevention are entirely hollow?
Matt Hancock
I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman has it slightly muddled up, because technology does involve capital investment, but it also includes revenue investment to ensure that the service element of any technology can continue to be delivered. Maybe he should have another look at how technology is delivered these days. Alongside the capital budget, we have record spending on the NHS to ensure that it is there for the long term. Of course public health is an important element of that, and there has been £16 billion for public health over this spending review period because it really matters.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
This June we published chapter 2 of the childhood obesity plan, which built on the world-leading measures we introduced in 2016 and included bold plans to halve childhood obesity by 2030. Our consultations on banning energy drinks and on calorie labelling are now open. Later this year we will be consulting on promotion and marketing restrictions, including suggestions of a 9 pm watershed.
Peter Aldous
The feedback that I receive locally in Waveney is that childhood obesity needs to be tackled by Government Departments, clinical commissioning groups, medical centres and councils working together, whether in schools or by encouraging breastfeeding and the preparation of weaning foods. Can the Minister confirm that he is pursuing such a multi-agency approach?
Steve Brine
I can, and the plan covers many Departments, which was why I recently announced the trailblazer programme to support innovative local action with local authorities. That has the commitment of key policy teams across many Departments to support participating councils to harness the potential of what they can do and learn from others.
Mary Robinson
One in five children in Greater Manchester are classified as overweight or obese, but Prospect Vale Primary School in Heald Green is just one of the schools in my constituency that are getting on and getting moving through the Daily Mile campaign. Will the Minister join me in welcoming that initiative, which brings daily fun and fitness into schools? As more and more adults use wristbands to help them to get fit, what consideration is being given to the use of technology, such as in the UK Fit Kids programme?
Steve Brine
Like my hon. Friend, I pay tribute to Prospect Vale. I have many similar examples in Winchester. We absolutely recognise the importance of physical activity in tackling obesity, which is why as part of chapter 2 we are promoting a new national ambition for all primary schools in England to adopt an active mile initiative.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
So further to the Minister’s previous answer, why did the Government abolish school sport partnerships?
Steve Brine
This Government are investing heavily in school sports through the school sport premium. For instance, the money raised from the soft drinks industry levy—the sugar tax—is going directly to supporting schools’ investment in sports, for instance through the Daily Mile campaign, which has just been mentioned.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
Scotland’s diet and healthy weight delivery plan contains specific recognition that breastfeeding can be a means of preventing obesity. Will Ministers engage with the all-party group on infant feeding and inequalities to see what more can be done in England through early breastfeeding to prevent children from becoming obese later on in life?
Steve Brine
Yes, and I am a big supporter of breastfeeding—I have supported it a lot in my constituency, and we engage regularly with the sector. I will be interested in any proposals that the hon. Lady has.
Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)
Alan Mak (Havant) (Con)
The Minister for Health (Stephen Barclay)
Having committed an additional £20 billion in real terms, the Government are asking the NHS to deliver a long-term plan that includes continued improvements in productivity and efficiency, and we are reinvesting the savings in improved patient care.
Damien Moore
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his drive to recycle more hospital equipment such as zimmer frames, crutches and wheelchairs, but what steps is his Department taking to encourage more hospitals such as Southport Hospital in my constituency to run recycling programmes to reduce waste in our NHS?
Stephen Barclay
I am keen to work with my hon. Friend to encourage Southport and other trusts to recycle equipment. I know from my family’s experience that it causes significant frustration when people see hospitals not collecting perfectly good medical equipment that could be recycled. I am keen to work with him and with trusts to ensure that we learn from that.
Stephen Barclay
I commend my hon. Friend for his excellent report for the Centre for Policy Studies, which highlights the opportunities provided by technology. I was at a Scan4Safety event last night, looking at how barcodes are being used at six trusts, and at how that could be expanded to deliver 4:1 efficiency savings and improve patient care through the safety it offers.
Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab)
Does the Minister believe that the practice of cutting funding to hospitals that miss A&E targets helps to improve the patient experience at those hospitals? Will he agree to meet me to discuss how this issue has affected Leighton hospital, which serves my constituents?
Stephen Barclay
The hon. Lady may have missed our recent announcement of significant additional funding, ahead of winter pressure, to assist hospitals. As the Secretary of State announced, the extra £20.5 billion real-terms increase is part of a wider commitment to support our hospitals.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
Jack Adcock’s death was a tragedy, but why did the General Medical Council spend £30,000 on getting Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba struck off, even though she had already faced the consequences of her mistakes in court? Does the Minister think that the GMC needs to sort its act out and that Charlie Massey should resign?
Stephen Barclay
As the right hon. Gentleman will be aware, Professor Norman Williams looked at the circumstances of this case and produced a report on it for the Government. As a part of that, we are looking at a number of factors.
David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con)
Is the Minister aware that in terms of value for money and efficiency, the Government of India’s integrated health Ministry has half a million ayurvedic doctors and a quarter of a million homeopathic doctors? At a clinic I visited recently in Karnataka province, four fifths of the patients who would have normally gone to see a western doctor were treated by those local doctors. Will he build links with the Indian Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy?
Stephen Barclay
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the longevity and sincerity of his campaigning on these issues. He draws attention to the wider point of how patients presenting with multiple and complex conditions need to be treated in multiple ways, and what he refers to is a part of that wider discussion.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
NHS England is being ripped off to the tune of £230 million a year as the price of some off-patent drugs and non-standard preparations, or specials, have been hiked up hundreds of times, for example to over £1,000 for a bottle of pain-relieving mouthwash. In Scotland, specials remain in-house to keep the price down, but a year and a half on from the Health Service Medical Supplies (Costs) Act 2017, why have the Government not used its powers to stop this drug racketeering?
Stephen Barclay
The hon. Lady, very astutely and correctly, identifies the issue, which is how we ensure value for money from specials. Indeed, I commend The Times for highlighting a number of these issues. We are looking at this area. As we commit an extra £20 billion in funding to the NHS, our commitment is to ensure that we derive value for money from that investment. That applies to specials, too.
Dr Whitford
The healthcare market in NHS England is estimated to cost £5 billion to £10 billion a year and involves 2.5 million nursing hours a week being wasted on non-clinical paperwork. Does the Minister not recognise that this is the biggest inefficiency? Will he commit to reversing the disastrous marketisation of NHS England?
Stephen Barclay
Again, the hon. Lady draws attention to my work on driving productivity improvements within the system, which looks at a range of efficiencies such as sending texts and emails, dealing with missed appointments and the use of green energy. We can implement a whole range of initiatives as a part of that agenda.
Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)
As the first port of call for patients with often minor ailments, community pharmacists can really help to improve the efficiency of the NHS by taking pressure off GPs. What plans do the Government have to support and enhance the role of community pharmacists?
Stephen Barclay
My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the valuable role played by pharmacies. This is part of a wider education campaign within the NHS and increased access to clinicians, such as through 111, is another component of that. We want to ensure that rather than people’s first port of call being a GP, they access the NHS and pharmacies at the appropriate time.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
At the end of the last financial year, trusts owed the Department a staggering £11 billion. NHS providers say that this is locking some trusts into
“a vicious circle of inevitable failure”,
and the King’s Fund says that there is no prospect of them ever repaying. Trusts with the biggest debts are forced to pay the highest levels of interest. How can the Minister expect trusts to be efficient when they are paying an interest rate of 6% on debts to his Department?
Stephen Barclay
As it happens, I will be at an event with NHS providers—chief execs—this evening, when I am sure that this will be one of a number of issues that we will discuss. The hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to the very high private finance initiative costs that many trusts face due to contracts signed under the previous Labour Government. That is a real pressure faced by many trusts.
Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)
Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
This month, we hosted the world’s first ever global ministerial mental health summit. Over 60 countries were represented, and they were united in the ambition to achieve equality for mental and physical health. The legacy of the summit will continue, with the baton now passed to the Netherlands, which has committed to host next year.
Richard Benyon
At the summit, I hope that the Government were applauded for appointing a Minister for suicide prevention. Will my right hon. Friend reflect on the fact that many people contemplating taking their life end up in A&E or in police stations, and will he look at James’ Place in Liverpool? That non-clinical centre catches young men in particular, who are very often the victims of this problem, and deals with their mental health issues.
Matt Hancock
Part of the purpose of having a cross-Government suicide prevention Minister is to bring together all these issues. I pay tribute to the work of James’ Place and its founder, Clare Milford Haven. We are spending £30 million of taxpayers’ money to increase the number of health-based places of safety for people experiencing a crisis, and I look forward to working with my hon. Friend on that.
Mr Speaker
No, the question has been grouped. The moment is now; the chance is here—let us hear from the hon. Gentleman.
Adam Afriyie
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the admonishment, or encouragement—
Adam Afriyie
Thank you very much.
It strikes me that every person in this Chamber, every one of our constituents and every household across the country will have been affected by the issue of suicide, whether among family, friends or colleagues. The causes of suicide are multi-faceted—there are so many, including mental health—so I welcome the new ministerial responsibility. Will my right hon. Friend clarify precisely what the role will entail in government?
Matt Hancock
I very much agree with my hon. Friend. The role will be cross-governmental. It will involve working not only across national Government, convening the policies that need to be pulled together from various Departments’ responses to support people in crisis and to reduce suicide, but with local government, which has responsibilities here.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
Suicide prevention plans have to be a key element of any mental health strategy, yet the Government are not monitoring the effectiveness of those plans or ensuring that they are fully funded. Will the Secretary of State commit to ensuring that the plans that are put in place are effective and that local authorities have sufficient funds to implement them properly?
Matt Hancock
The hon. Lady is right to draw attention to the need to ensure that funding for mental health services has parity with that for physical health services. Getting there is the work of a generation. We did not even measure access to mental health services until this Government brought that in, and we are working towards parity.
Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)
The Secretary of State boasted to the global ministerial mental health summit about the Government’s plans to recruit 21,000 more staff to the mental health workforce by 2021, but he did not tell the summit that by the end of May this year, nearly 25,000 mental health staff—one in eight of the workforce—had left the NHS and that fewer than 1,000 extra staff had been recruited by March, equating to just 0.5% of his target. Does he really think that he is in a position to lecture the rest of the world?
Matt Hancock
I welcome the hon. Lady’s commitment to this area. Clearly it is very important to have the workforce in place. As she said, we are making progress, but we still have more to do. As far as the international approach is concerned, the response to the summit was that many countries came together, because collectively we all face the same sorts of challenges. I am in absolutely no doubt that the leadership shown by some countries, including the UK, is warmly welcomed.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
The links between poor mental health, suicide and gambling addiction have been made clear to the Health and Social Care Committee. In that regard, will the Secretary of State make it clear to the Treasury that many across the House want to make sure that action on fixed odds betting terminals is taken forward so that we can have good results in the areas of mental health and suicide prevention?
Matt Hancock
My hon. Friend knows my personal strength of feeling about tackling the scourge of fixed odds betting terminals. The links between gambling addiction and mental health issues—and indeed, directly to suicide—are clear in the evidence, and we must address them.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
My constituent David contacted me after his 18-year-old son became severely mentally unwell and needed emergency treatment. His son spent four days in A&E at the local hospital because no in-patient beds were available. This is not a one-off case: on a daily basis, mentally unwell people are being failed by our health service. When will the Secretary of State take meaningful action to fund mental health services properly and stop this scandal?
Matt Hancock
I am glad that, like me, the hon. Lady cares so much about getting this right. The long-term plan, which we are writing with the NHS, for how we will spend the £20 billion funding increase is where we can get these details right. Access to mental health services was not even measured before. The first step was to put the measurement in place, and now we can act on that measurement with the huge increase in funding coming to the NHS.
Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
Yes, we are fully committed to ensuring that the most innovative cancer treatments are available to patients on the NHS. Since 2016, the radiotherapy modernisation programme has seen £130 million of new investment to ensure that all new equipment is capable of delivering advanced radiotherapy.
Grahame Morris
I thank the Minister for that reply. May I point out how effective advanced radiotherapy is against many cancers affecting the soft tissue? I must declare an interest as a beneficiary of the treatment myself. The latest NHS research shows that treating prostate cancer with 20 treatments of advanced radiotherapy is far better for patient outcomes and would save the NHS more than £20 million a year, but the current tariffs system disincentives trusts from saving this money, as their income is based on the number of treatments. Will the Minister meet me and representatives of the all-party group on radiotherapy to discuss how we might address this anomaly and improve treatments?
Steve Brine
It is good to see the hon. Gentleman in his place and looking so well—I am glad we looked after him well. He is absolutely right that access to advanced radiotherapy treatments is critical, as is getting them against the key standard. I would be very pleased to meet his all-party group and discuss its manifesto for radiotherapy.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Lady was standing. She has changed her mind. All right, never mind. We can always have another go later.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
The Minister for Health (Stephen Barclay)
The planned temporary overnight closure of the Princess Royal Hospital’s A&E in Telford is necessary to ensure that patients continue to receive safe care. The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust is working closely with colleagues in neighbouring provider trusts and the ambulance service to develop plans for key clinical pathways to minimise the impact.
Emma Reynolds
The proposed closure of Telford A&E would pile even more pressure on New Cross Hospital in my constituency. If the Government will not step in to stop the closure, as it sounds is the case from the Minister’s answer, will they give New Cross the resources it needs to recruit upfront the nurses, doctors and other staff they need so that patients do not have to suffer longer delays?
Stephen Barclay
The current modelling suggests that about 11 ambulances will be diverted from the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust between the hours of 10 pm and 8 am during closure. Of the patients who go to Wolverhampton, any admitted as in-patients will return to Shrewsbury and Telford and any who are discharged will be discharged from Wolverhampton.
Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)
The chief executive of Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust says that the closure at Telford is the result of bad planning and could have been prevented. Does the Minister agree it is wholly unacceptable that my constituents’ safety should be put at risk by a preventable closure that is the result of bad planning by management, and will he do all he can to ensure that the hospital management have the help they need to properly run our hospital and properly plan for the needs of our community?
Stephen Barclay
First, may I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who has campaigned assiduously on behalf of her constituents? She has lobbied me and the Secretary of State and made her case very powerfully to NHS leaders. There has been progress: three additional consultants have been hired and attempts made to recruit middle-ranking doctors to the trust, including from neighbouring trusts. We are making a significant capital investment in the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, and these changes must be seen in the light of that.
Mr Speaker
No, no; Yorkshire is the most marvellous place, but it is a considerable distance from the narrow ambit of the question, from which the Minister did not stray. The ingenuity of those Members will be served later in our proceedings.
Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister for Care (Caroline Dinenage)
Health and social care hubs are a great example of health and care systems coming together through sustainability and transformation partnerships and integrated care systems to transform services in local areas. The NHS long-term plan will set out how we will enable and encourage better integration.
Luke Pollard
The Minister will know that Plymouth is leading the way in developing health and social care wellbeing hubs. She will also know that we have bid for £15 million of funding to create more hubs across the city, especially in our city centre, to bring together NHS dentistry and dental schools, sexual and mental health support, social care and new forms of general practice. Will she do all that she can to look positively on that bid, so that we can help to improve our health outcomes?
Caroline Dinenage
I am really pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised this issue. Plymouth is indeed leading the way in creating hubs and showing how incredibly valuable they are in bringing together all the relevant services in one place, not only to tackle people’s current healthcare needs but to play a vital role in prevention.
Derek Thomas (St Ives) (Con)
Health and social care hubs provide a real opportunity to ensure that patients are cared for in the right place, and it is vital for that to be extended to those who need palliative care. Can the Minister confirm that the NHS 10-year plan will adequately address the need for equal and appropriate access to palliative care across the country?
Caroline Dinenage
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to mention this. Palliative care is crucial to the experience not only of patients but of their families and carers. He will be interested to know that we have a new indicator from 2018-19 to measure the proportion of people who have had three or more emergency admissions in their last 90 days of life, which will help us to assess how people can be better supported in the community, and to do that better.
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
Caroline Dinenage
The hon. Lady is right. We know that the adult social care system is under pressure, which is why we are setting out a more sustainable future in the Green Paper which will be published later this year. It is, however, important to point out that more than 83% of adult social care providers are rated good or outstanding, and that, thanks to a range of Government actions, County Durham has received an additional £37 million for adult social care in 2018-19 and was allocated £2,822,376 in the recent winter funding announcement.
Sir David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
Britain is world leading at treating cancer when it is discovered, but we do not diagnose it early enough, so we will radically overhaul our screening programmes, roll out rapid diagnostic centres for people with early symptoms, and expand mobile lung screening units. Our ambition is to ensure that three quarters of cancers are diagnosed at stage 1 or 2 by 2028, up from half today.
Sir David Evennett
May I first highlight the excellent Guy’s Cancer Centre at Queen Mary’s hospital in Sidcup, a state-of-the-art facility which offers local cancer patients treatment closer to home? Secondly, can my right hon. Friend provide any detail on how the NHS long-term plan will improve cancer services?
Matt Hancock
Yes. Focusing on early diagnosis will help to save lives. Indeed, the cancer survival rates have never been higher than they are now. About 7,000 people who are alive today would not have been had mortality rates stayed the same as they were in 2010. However, we want to use the most cutting-edge technologies in order to save more lives.
Kwasi Kwarteng
In respect of early screening, how does my right hon. Friend expect the measures that he has introduced to move the service forward in the way that we want to see?
Matt Hancock
Absolutely central to this is ensuring that we address cancer at the earliest possible opportunity. The earlier the diagnosis is made, the greater is the likelihood of survival, so we want to see more cancers diagnosed earlier across the board.
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
Matt Hancock
The announcement the details of which I have just set out comes with £1.6 billion of the £20 billion uplift we are putting into the NHS written into the long-term plan, so the funding is there to deliver on this policy, too.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
The Secretary of State is right to say that early diagnosis provides more opportunity to cure and treat cancers. Some 60% of those treated for cancer will receive radiotherapy, and nearly every radiotherapy centre in the country has linear accelerators that are enabled to provide the advanced SABR, or stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy, technology, but Government—NHS England—contracts mean that out of the 52 centres in England no more than 20 are contracted to actually use this technology. That means that either patients are not receiving the highest quality life-saving standard of treatment that they could be or that trusts are providing it anyway but are not being paid and valuable data on mistreatment are being completely lost. Will the right hon. Gentleman order NHS England to stop this recklessness, and frankly lethal, nonsense and agree to every—
Mr Speaker
Order. [Interruption.] Order. The thrust of the question is entirely clear. I was going to offer the hon. Gentleman an Adjournment debate on the subject until I realised that he had in fact just conducted it.
Matt Hancock
And also, Mr Speaker, the hon. Gentleman’s all-party group is meeting my Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), on this very matter. Since 2016 we have put £130 million of funding in to try to resolve the issue that the hon. Gentleman talks about: to make sure that all new equipment is capable of delivering advanced radiotherapy. Work on this is ongoing.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
In calling the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) I promise to make no reference to the result of the match last night between Arsenal and Leicester City.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Mr Speaker, you had a broader smile on your face this morning than my friend the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and I. We still support Leicester and hope we will pay you back some day.
An important aspect of diagnosing cancer is to find the drugs that address it. What has been done to ensure the partnerships between universities and the NHS can continue, so that they can find new drugs and therefore address cancers at a very early stage?
Matt Hancock
There are deepening relationships between universities and the NHS right across the country, especially in this field of the combination of diagnosis and early treatment. Some of the most advanced technology and research in the world is happening in universities in the UK in order to save lives, which is such an important issue here.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
We will continue to have access to new medicines through the deal we expect to negotiate with the EU. In the unlikely event of no deal, we will directly recognise batch testing of medicines done in the EU. We are currently consulting on the approach to licensing medicines in a no-deal scenario, but I am clear that patients should not be disadvantaged and should continue to have timely access to new medicines.
Alan Brown
The reality is that Brexit uncertainty about future medicine approvals and unresolved issues with the European Medicines Agency have caused research firm Recardio to suspend UK recruitment to a drug trial, posing a risk to its business and interrupting the research. As the EMA has no associate membership for third countries, how does the Secretary of State plan to avoid the UK being left out of future clinical trials despite his bluster?
Matt Hancock
Not only does the UK bring a huge amount to the table in terms of research, but we fully intend to make sure that we have a robust and seamless system in place. A consultation is out at the moment and we will respond to it very shortly.
Martyn Day
The Government have stated that the new EU clinical trials regulations will not be in place before March, but have committed to aligning with it where possible. What progress has been made regarding data sharing to ensure that clinical trials continue and pharmaceutical and research firms do not leave the UK after Brexit?
Matt Hancock
As part of the EU deal we are negotiating, the relationship with the EMA will be extremely close, so I am sure that that will be a part of our agreement.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Will the Health Secretary confirm that since the referendum the number of EU nationals working in our NHS has actually risen by 4,000, and that regardless of the state of the negotiations their rights will be protected and they will continue to be able to work in the NHS after we leave?
Matt Hancock
Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. In fact, the number of EU nationals working in the NHS has now risen by more than 4,000 since the referendum, and we welcome them all.
Mr Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow) (Lab)
The Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury (Nigel Adams)
It was disappointing that in July and August, Vertex, the manufacturer of Orkambi, rejected the final offer made by NHS England, as well as rejecting the opportunity for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence—NICE—to appraise its new medicines, as is required for all companies seeking routine NHS funding for their products. Vertex must re-engage with NICE and NHS England, and I am encouraged that it attended a meeting with NICE on 4 October to discuss next steps.
Mr Hepburn
As the Minister knows, Orkambi is available for cystic fibrosis sufferers in Ireland, Greece, Denmark and a host of other countries around the world, so when will it be available for cystic fibrosis sufferers in this country?
Nigel Adams
I know that the hon. Gentleman takes a keen interest in this subject and that he campaigns assiduously on behalf of his constituents in this regard. He is right to suggest that Ministers are keeping a very close eye on these negotiations, and we urge Vertex to consider NHS England’s fair and final offer. However, it is absolutely right that we have a system—introduced by the Labour party—in which experts, not politicians, determine the fair price for a drug, based on robust evidence.
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)
I almost thought you had forgotten about me, Mr Speaker.
Last month, speaking on this very subject, the Secretary of State said that he would not let pharmaceutical companies hold the NHS to ransom, but the 5,200 patients who could benefit from Orkambi are left suffering while this war of words continues. What does the Secretary of State have to say, through his Minister, to those patients who are awaiting a resolution to this stalemate?
Nigel Adams
The hon. Lady makes a correct point, and we are very keen that patients receive this drug. I understand her ire, but perhaps it should be directed at Vertex, the manufacturer. The offer of £500 million over five years for the size of the eligible population is the largest-ever commitment of its kind in the 70-year history of the NHS, and it would guarantee immediate and expanded access to Orkambi and to other drugs.
James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)
The Minister for Care (Caroline Dinenage)
Our NHS offers a range of world-leading preventive care services, but we can go further and faster. The Secretary of State has named prevention as one of his top three priorities, signalling a renewed focus on public health, community and mental health services.
James Cleverly
I thank the Minister for her reply. She will know, because I have spoken about this to the Secretary of State’s team, about the pressures on my constituency, and particularly on the Church Lane GP surgery. Specifically on preventive services, wearable tech, health tech and medical tech provide an opportunity to keep people healthier for longer, and can provide early digital diagnosis that can relieve pressure on medical services. What more can be done to pursue this way of relieving pressure on the health service?
Caroline Dinenage
I completely agree that technology can really help in this way. I recently visited Hampshire County Council, which is using a range of gadgets including a really simple one involving a light bulb that comes on when someone gets out of bed in the night to go for a pee. That is ingenious, and it is helping to prevent avoidable falls.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
My constituent Holly Alliston has contacted me about the epipens that her two-year-old son, who has a severe nut allergy, relies on. There is a national shortage of them, and the Northfield Pharmacy has been emailed by NHS England to say that the situation is critical. What is the Minister doing about this? We hear about the possibility of troops having to distribute stockpiled medicines when we leave the EU, but this is hitting us now.
Caroline Dinenage
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to raise this matter. We are working closely with all the manufacturers of adrenaline auto-injectors to improve the supply situation as quickly as possible.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
One in 10 mums gets post-natal depression, and we know that early identification is key to preventing it from becoming more serious. May I urge the Minister to look at the National Childbirth Trust’s campaign to ensure that all mums—as well as all babies—get a six-week check?
Caroline Dinenage
We are really supportive of the Hidden Half campaign, run by the NCT—my colleague the Minister met the trust last week. We must ensure that we are supportive of new mothers’ health needs.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
What improvements have emerged in relation to prostate cancer treatments?
Caroline Dinenage
I am really pleased that the hon. Gentleman has raised that. Clearly, early screening is fundamental and one of the key pillars of what we want to focus on with cancers. Prostate cancer affects so many gentlemen up and down the country, and we know that that early detection is the difference between life and death.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
We continue to make good progress against our 2013 AMR strategy ambitions. According to the latest figures, since 2013, antibiotic prescriptions dispensed by GPs have decreased by 13%, and sales of antibiotics for use in food-producing animals dropped by 27%.
Michael Fabricant
That is encouraging to hear because antimicrobial resistance is caused by the excessive and inappropriate use of antibiotics. Given that we have a Matt Hancock app, should not we have a similar app to try to educate people about when it is appropriate and not appropriate to use antibiotics?
Steve Brine
I will look at what can be added to the Matt Hancock app—there is always room for more.
As luck would have it, today Public Health England has launched its latest “Keep Antibiotics Working” national public awareness campaign, which aims to educate the public about the risks of AMR and urges them always to take the advice of their healthcare professionals on antibiotics and, when necessary, to challenge them.
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
AMR poses a grave threat to health. Professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, told our Health and Social Care Committee inquiry that if action is not taken to address this
“growing threat, modern medicine will be lost.”
Will the Secretary of State and Ministers heed that warning and ensure that AMR is prioritised?
Steve Brine
Absolutely. The UK is a global leader in tackling AMR and we are currently working on the refresh of our strategy. I was at the G20 earlier this month, where Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, showed world leadership and led an exercise with world leaders to strengthen understanding by showing how developed countries would tackle an outbreak.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
This Government have a strong track record on public health. Local authorities in England are supported by ring-fenced public health grants of more than £16 billion over the current spending review period. Decisions on future funding are, of course, for the next spending review.
Diana Johnson
Substance misuse services are due to be slashed by £34 million owing to cuts imposed by central Government. In Hull, and I am sure in many other parts of the country, there is a growing blight on our streets caused by Spice and other substances. How is it in any way helpful to communities, frontline police or the NHS for the Government to cut services that help people deal with their addictions?
Steve Brine
As I said, we are spending £16 billion of our constituents’ money during this spending review period on public health grants. Decisions about where we go in future are of course not a matter for me but for the Chancellor in the spending review. This House decided in the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to make every upper tier local authority a public health authority. We believe that it is right for local authorities to make those decisions, with the funding that we give them.
Dr Paul Williams (Stockton South) (Lab)
How many health visitors have been lost since 2015? How will the Minister ensure that important investments are made at the start of life to reduce health inequalities?
Steve Brine
As I suspect the hon. Gentleman knows, I do not have that figure at my fingertips, but I will provide it to him. Health visitors are a critical part of the puzzle, and local authorities are well aware of that, as are Ministers.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Matt Hancock)
The Department is working with the NHS to ensure that the £20 billion of extra taxpayers’ money is well spent: supporting social care, backing the workforce, using the best modern technology and strengthening prevention. On that note, I can tell the House that we now have a record number of GPs in training: 3,473—10% up on last year.
Huw Merriman
I thank the Secretary of State for so promptly accepting our invitation to visit us in East Sussex in January. He will be warmly welcomed. With that season in mind, what assessment has he made of the NHS’s resilience with winter approaching?
Matt Hancock
Of course winter always challenges the NHS, and this year will be no different. We have put in extra funding, including more capital funding, to ensure that we get the best possible flow through A&E and to ensure there is further funding for social care so that people who do not need to be in hospital can leave hospital.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Last week, The Times reported that a young autistic woman with severe learning disabilities and an IQ of 52 was sexually exploited for months after her care provider had a court accept a plan for her to have sexual relations with men at her home. It is unacceptable that the agency charged with the care of this young woman decided that unsupervised contact with men for sex was in her best interest, yet the Government would give all such care providers a role in assessing the mental capacity of the people for whom they care. Will the Secretary of State urgently investigate this case? Given that the case illustrates the conflict of interest that arises from involving care providers in mental capacity assessments, will he pause the Mental Capacity (Amendment) Bill to allow time to make it fit for purpose?
The Minister for Care (Caroline Dinenage)
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to raise this incredibly concerning case. Unfortunately, because the case is ongoing and due to be heard before the High Court very shortly, we are unable to discuss the specifics of the case, but we are incredibly concerned by what it suggests. We have made it clear in statutory guidance to support the implementation of the Care Act 2014 that we expect local authorities to ensure that the services they commission are safe, effective and high quality. Once this case has gone through the High Court, we will look to take further action.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
The Minister for Health (Stephen Barclay)
My hon. Friend is right to highlight this. The Secretary of State was at the trust last week, and I visited earlier in the year. There is a specific range of actions, including partnership with Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust; advanced clinical practitioner courses, which started in June; £1.8 million of capital to support improvements to patient flow; and a frailty pilot at Lincoln. There is an intensive programme of work with this trust, because we recognise my hon. Friend’s concerns.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
Stephen Barclay
As the hon. Lady will know, since 2010, the number of paramedics has increased by more than 30% and the pay band has been increased from band 5 to band 6. She will also know from the excellent work of Lord Carter that there was significant variation between ambulance services and a significant opportunity to make savings that can be reinvested in ambulances by addressing differences in sickness rates, “hear and treat” and “see and treat” rates and other variables. We have also committed additional funding for new ambulances, including in the north-west, which will be in place by this winter.
Boris Johnson (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Con)
Matt Hancock
My right hon. Friend is an assiduous supporter of his constituents. I look forward very much to taking up his invitation to visit. I have looked into some of the details of the proposal on the table and, indeed, at some of the other proposals that may benefit the Hillingdon area. I look forward to discussing them with him.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
Matt Hancock
Yes, of course I will make sure the appropriate action is taken in this case. It is a sensitive matter, and I look forward to discussing it with the hon. Lady.
James Duddridge (Rochford and Southend East) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Steve Brine)
We certainly will. I do not wish to pre-empt what the long-term plan will say, but it is an excellent opportunity for us to look at how the NHS can best support people who have or are at risk of developing diabetes, and that includes transformation funding beyond next spring and how technology can be used to help people better manage that long-term condition.
Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)
Stephen Barclay
I am not aware of the specific details of that, but I am happy to meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss it if he has particular concerns he wishes to raise.
Mr Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)
Steve Brine
We are continuing to review the advice from our expert advisory groups on safe levels of folate intake, but, continuing our tradition of announcing things to the House first, I want to inform the House today that we are going to issue a public consultation, as of now, on adding folic acid to flour.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The service from the East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust has been a considerable disappointment for many of my constituents in recent months. When I met them about the service, they told me that on a huge number of occasions they have ambulances sat waiting outside accident and emergency departments, rather than getting to the next call. What more can the Government do to make sure we get these A&Es cleared?
Stephen Barclay
The hon. Gentleman is right to say that we need to improve those handovers. We have improvement programmes in place at 11 hospital sites in the east midlands, alongside which we are making a £4.9 million investment in 37 new ambulances. Part of this is also about the length of stay and addressing the pathway.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
Steve Brine
As my hon. Friend, the chair of the all-party group on smoking and health, knows, those groups are key to delivering our tobacco control plan. We are not complacent at all; the delivery plan that was published in June sets out the actions that different agencies will take to deliver the five-year plan, and that absolutely includes mentor cessation services.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
I very much welcome news of the consultation on the mandatory fortification of flour with folic acid, but are the Government consulting on whether it should happen or on how it should happen?
Steve Brine
We will be taking evidence, including from the Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment, which is meeting as we speak, to look at the safe upper limit of folate levels. I am particularly keen to get that right, but I am convinced that the evidence shows overwhelmingly that this is something we should be doing.
Sir Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)
Matt Hancock
My right hon. Friend identifies a critical factor in improving the future of the NHS, which is to have stronger leadership at all levels, to be able to support innovation and to find out the best that is happening elsewhere and bring it to trusts. I know he has a particular interest in that, and I look forward to working with him on it.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
Foetal alcohol spectrum disorders mean permanent brain damage. In the United States, studies show that one in 20 children are affected. So when will this Government carry out their own prevalence study, so that we can confirm the extent of this entirely preventable disability in the UK?
Steve Brine
Public Health England collects some data on foetal alcohol syndrome, but we recognise that the data do not reflect the range of FASD. These disorders are difficult to diagnose, which is why we are engaging experts and those affected to explore what more could be done to improve our understanding.
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)
I thank the Secretary of State for the extra £5 million for East Midlands ambulance service and for the £4.5 million extra for Nottingham University Hospitals Trust, which will mean at least 150 more beds this winter, all of which will help with winter planning, but does he agree that it behoves us all to play our own part in keeping fit and healthy and to use the NHS services responsibly?
Matt Hancock
My right hon. Friend makes a very important point, which is that, while we drive to ensure that the NHS is prepared as possible for this winter, it is incumbent on everybody to exercise their judgment, yes, to access the NHS where it is needed and important, but also to make sure that they bear a personal responsibility, too.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals Trust is proposing to close our midwife-led maternity unit, telling me that, while it is safe, unless it has 500 births a year, it is not value for money. Is that a new national standard for midwife maternity units, because if so it would close 90% of free-standing units? Will a Minister meet me on this matter, because it is unfair on local parents, and, frankly, we are sick and tired of losing services from our towns?
Stephen Barclay
I am happy to meet the right hon. Lady and to discuss the matter further.
Tom Pursglove (Corby) (Con)
I am extremely concerned about the case of Logan, a young boy in my constituency who requires round-the-clock care and the handling of his case by Corby clinical commissioning group. I have written to the Minister raising concerns about this case, but is he willing to meet me and Logan’s parents, Darren and Wendy, to talk about how this could perhaps be resolved and to apply any pressure that he can, because, as a family, they should be making memories at the moment, not battling local NHS bureaucracy?
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
Is it true that the Secretary of State is now so worried about the supply of vital medicines in the event of a no deal or a hard Brexit that he has asked the pharmaceutical industry to extend the period of stockpiling from six weeks to 20 weeks?
Matt Hancock
No, that is not true. We are working very closely with the pharmaceutical industry to make sure that, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, which I regard as unlikely, we mitigate as much as possible the impact on the supply of medicines and that the supply of medicines can be unhindered.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend, the Minister with responsibility for antimicrobial resistance, consider a 10% levy on antibiotics? If such a levy were applied globally, it would raise £3 billion a year, which is the amount specified in the O’Neill review to fund research into this area properly.
Steve Brine
I thank my hon. Friend for his consistent work in this area. Stimulating the pipeline for new antimicrobials and alternative treatments is a complex matter. I can assure him that we continue to work with our international partners—I mentioned the G20 earlier —and that absolutely involves market entry awards, which, as he knows, is a global problem that requires a similar solution.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
Every week in this country, two children are born with spina bifida or anencephaly, and I am delighted that the Minister has just announced the consultation on the fortification of flour, which could stop 70% of those birth defects. Can he tell the House how quickly he hopes to bring about the conclusion of the consultation?
Steve Brine
Let me just pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for the work that he has done, bringing this matter to the fore and really pushing it forward. The answer is as soon as possible. I also want to make sure that I can involve the other agencies. Public Health England will be very important in this, because, of course, not every woman eats bread and therefore takes the flour supplement.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
I am sure that the Minister is aware that October is breast cancer awareness month. I welcome the ambition that the Prime Minister set out at the party conference for 75% early-stage diagnosis. There is some concern that, as breast cancer is already above that, there is no ambition left for it to do even better. Can he assure me and the breast cancer community that that is not the case?
Steve Brine
That is certainly not the case. We had a very good debate on breast cancer last week. It is BCAM still this month for another week. The 75% was a target, a new national ambition. It most certainly is not the limit of our ambition.
Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)
Will the Government write off the debts of Yorkshire hospitals so that extra money invested can go into patient care?
Stephen Barclay
As the Secretary of State set out, we are making a significant funding commitment to the NHS—the extra £20 billion—but that is not conditional on writing off debt.
Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)
Will the Minister please provide an update to the House on work to ensure that we train more GPs for England, particularly for west Oxfordshire?
Matt Hancock
Yes. My hon. Friend will have heard that we have record numbers of GPs in training— 10% up on last year. I want to see more GPs—5,000 more across the country—and, no doubt, some of those in west Oxfordshire.
Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)
I have a constituent who has Turner syndrome, a female-only genetic disorder that affects one in every 2,000 baby girls. Owing to this, she has to take several medications every day of her life, and this is mounting up as she gets older. She works so she is not on any benefits and has to pay for her medications herself. Will the Minister consider exempting those who suffer from lifelong conditions such as Turner syndrome from paying for their prescriptions? Surely, it cannot be right that people in England should be treated differently from those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where such prescription charges have been abolished.
Steve Brine
I would be very happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss her constituent’s case.
Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)
I am hearing deeply concerning reports about ambulance waits outside Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, and the Minister is aware of these concerns. We welcome the capital funding that is going into this trust, but will he meet me to discuss what more can be done to improve patient handover, which is concerning for my constituents?
Stephen Barclay
As my hon. Friend says, there is significant capital investment into Worcestershire, as well as a major programme of improvements addressing variation in ambulances, but of course I am also happy to meet her to discuss the matter.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
Last week, the chief executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry warned that even associate membership of the European Medicines Agency would not do for our life sciences sector, so can the Secretary of State tell us how much longer we will have to wait and how much more we will have to pay for new medicines if we are outside the European medicines market?
Matt Hancock
We will not have to wait longer; we will ensure that we get the best medicines to the people of Britain long after we are members of the European Union, as we did before we were members of the European Union.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
As in the health service under successive Governments of both colours, demand exceeds supply and we cannot carry on indefinitely, but let us hear a few more questions.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Last week, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health revealed that there has been an increase in infant mortality for the first time in 100 years. Four in every 1,000 babies will not reach their first birthday, compared with 2.8 in every 1,000 babies in Europe. This was warned against as an effect of austerity. What assessment has the Health Secretary done on the effects of next week’s Budget on child health and the longevity of our children?
Matt Hancock
I saw that report and we are analysing it. Last week was Baby Loss Awareness Week, and I am glad that there is more awareness of the issue now than there was previously. It is a very important issue that we are looking at right across the board.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
About two hours ago, I rang to book a flu jab less than a mile away from here. Unfortunately, staff said that they had run out and will not be able to do it until 2 November. The Secretary of State is nodding. He seems to know the answer to everything. What is the issue? Will he give me the answer? This never happened under Labour.
Matt Hancock
If the hon. Gentleman is claiming that there were not enough flu jabs under Labour, I might agree with him, because there are now more flu jabs. More than 4 million flu jabs have already taken place. I am delighted that lots of people want flu jabs because everybody who needs one should get one. The arrival of the flu jab medicine is phased, because we have to ensure that we get the right flu jabs. If the hon. Gentleman could carry on promoting flu jabs for the elderly, I would be delighted.
Mr Speaker
Nevertheless, the hon. Gentleman has had his say, and I feel sure that he will say it again as often as is necessary.
Sir Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)
Will the Minister tell me whether the withdrawal of funding for the Healthy Futures programme in the north-west and Public Health Action in the south-west is likely to help or hinder us meeting the smoking cessation targets in the tobacco control programme?
Steve Brine
This comes back to the matter of public health budgets—£16 billion during the current spending review period, with local authorities best placed to make local decisions on what is needed in their local area. That is the same in the right hon. Gentleman’s area as it is in mine.
James Frith (Bury North) (Lab)
Last month, the Mayor of Greater Manchester adopted the five recommendations of my report, “Living Well and Dying Well”, which seeks to include hospice care provision more formally in our NHS and social care planning. Will the Minister meet me and representatives of our hospices to see how we might best make use of these brilliant community health assets?
Caroline Dinenage
Yes, I am happy to meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss the matter. Hospices provide an incredible level of care right across the UK, and we cannot do enough to support them.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. There were 30 topical questions. Although there was scope for many more, I am afraid that we have to stop now. Thank you, colleagues.
Abortion
Tuesday 23rd October 2018
(6 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Abortion Bill 2017-19 View all Abortion Bill 2017-19 Debates Read Hansard Text
12:59 - The House divided: - Ayes: 208 / Noes: 123 - Question accordingly agreed to.
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Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the law relating to abortion in England and Wales, and Northern Ireland; to remove criminal liability in respect of abortion performed with the consent of the pregnant woman up to the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy; to repeal sections 59 and 60 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861; to create offences of termination of a pregnancy after its twenty-fourth week and non-consensual termination of a pregnancy; to amend the law relating to conscientious objection to participation in abortion treatment; and for connected purposes.
I thank Gordon Nardell QC and Professor Sally Sheldon for drafting the Bill. It is supported by the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Royal College of Midwives, the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, Amnesty International, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the Family Planning Association, Marie Stopes International, the End Violence against Women Coalition, Women’s Aid and the TUC.
Abortion in our country is underpinned by the oldest legal framework for any healthcare treatment, with the harshest criminal sentences in the developed world for women having an illegal abortion. Poland, the USA, Canada and parts of Australia do not criminalise women. The law needs to be updated to deal with the advances in women’s healthcare and sex and relationships education, and with the role of the internet—all of which have occurred alongside the changing attitudes in society.
Our current abortion laws date back to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861—back to a time when Queen Victoria was on the throne and women were still decades away from getting the right to vote. Under the 1861 Act, any woman procuring her own miscarriage and anyone assisting her can go to prison for life. In 1967, Parliament voted for the Abortion Act, which gave a route for women in England and Wales to access abortion legally, by setting out specific exemptions and conditions, including the need for signatures from two doctors agreeing that, for example, a termination is necessary to prevent permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman. Women’s lives have been saved in their thousands by David Steel’s 1967 Act, which meant that women no longer had to seek out unsafe, unregulated backstreet abortionists.
So, what are the facts about abortion today? One in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime. These days, 80% of abortions take place in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and are medically induced by taking tablets, not by surgical procedures. It is the only medical procedure that requires the agreement of two doctors. In 2007, the Science and Technology Committee found no evidence that this requirement
“serves to safeguard women or doctors”.
The 1967 Act has never applied to Northern Ireland, and the chilling effect of the 1861 Act means that abortion hardly ever takes places in Northern Ireland. It is one of the harshest abortion regimes in the world, with no abortion available in cases of rape, incest or fatal foetal abnormality. This is what a woman from Northern Ireland says:
“I spent Christmas Day in casualty with my two children. My husband had beaten me to a pulp…He had repeatedly raped me…Six weeks later I discovered I was pregnant, I could not continue with the pregnancy. Knowing my husband would carry out his threats to kill me if he found out, I went to my GP who told me abortion was illegal in Northern Ireland and refused to help.”
Or let us consider Denise’s story. She was told midway through her pregnancy that her baby had Edwards syndrome and would not survive. Very ill and unable to travel, Denise was forced to continue with her pregnancy because she lived in Northern Ireland. She was repeatedly asked about her baby and that, she said, left her feeling tortured. She said:
“Every minute, every second of the day—you have to live with the knowledge that the child inside you is going to die.”
Or imagine being 18-year-old Emma, who found out at 20 weeks that her baby had anencephaly and would not survive. She could not face traveling to England for an abortion because she wanted to be surrounded by her loving family. She had to continue the pregnancy to term because she lived in Northern Ireland, and she was eventually induced to give birth to her stillborn daughter.
Then there was the mother who found out that her 15-year-old daughter was pregnant and that her abusive partner has threatened to
“kick the baby out and stab it if it is born.”
Feeling that she had no other option, she bought her daughter abortion tablets online. Seeking support for her daughter from their family doctor concerning the abusive relationship—not the abortion—she now faces a potential prison sentence for trying to help her daughter access medical care denied to her by their Government.
Then there is the heartbreaking account this week on Twitter from a Northern Ireland woman who has been live-tweeting at @ratherbehome her experience of having to travel to England for an abortion. She says this:
“I should be at home, in the privacy of my own home. Instead I’m trying to discreetly bleed in a shitty hotel. There’s no dignity. There’s no privacy.”
These are real-life examples of what women in Northern Ireland face under the current abortion law. Consider for a moment the morality of laws that mean that women in Northern Ireland seeking an abortion after being impregnated through a sexual crime, rape or incest, could face a heavier criminal punishment than the perpetrators—the real criminals.
This June, the Supreme Court found that Northern Ireland’s current abortion laws breach women’s human rights in Northern Ireland. In February 2018, the United Nations found that thousands of women and girls in Northern Ireland are subject to grave and systematic violations of their rights, being compelled either to travel outside Northern Ireland for a legal abortion or to carry their pregnancy to term. With the Northern Ireland Assembly not sitting since January 2017, UK politicians can no longer look away while vulnerable women in Northern Ireland, often suffering in desperate circumstances, have their human rights breached. As Hillary Clinton said:
“Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights”.
Let there be no hard borders in the Irish sea over human rights.
Polling research released on 10 October 2018 by Amnesty International shows that 65% of people in Northern Ireland believe that
“having an abortion should not be a crime”,
while 66% supported the view that in the absence of devolved government,
“Westminster should legislate to reform the law”.
If Westminster does decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland, it will then be for the Northern Ireland Assembly to decide what abortion provision should look like there.
Meanwhile, even in England and Wales, a woman using abortion tablets bought online is committing a criminal offence punishable by life imprisonment—and it is often the most vulnerable women, finding it difficult to access termination services, who turn to the internet. Women on Web, a doctor-led online medical service, says that 16% of women cite domestic or “honour” violence, and 8% intimate partner violence, as reasons to seek tablets online. Whether in Birmingham, Belfast or Bangor, women need a modern, supportive, humane, properly regulated medical regime that encourages them to come forward for the best professional advice and treatment, not drives them, isolated and scared, into the unregulated internet pills market.
Therefore, my Bill ensures that up to 24 weeks’ foetal gestation, women and clinicians would no longer be subject to the criminal law for consensual abortion. The 24-week time limit remains, and decriminalisation does not mean the deregulation of abortion: safeguards stay in place. My aim is for effective regulation fit for purpose in the 21st century. The existing body of law and professional standards governing medical procedures would stay. It would remain a crime to offer abortion services without being registered to do so, while anyone supplying medication without a legal prescription would breach the Human Medicines Regulations 2012. Clinics would continue to be registered and subject to Care Quality Commission oversight.
Very importantly, my Bill would also strengthen protection for women and target the criminal law on the real criminals. Anyone—an abusive partner, for example —who ends a pregnancy against a woman’s wishes through violence, or by administering abortion pills without the woman’s knowledge, would be subject to a life sentence. My Bill also protects doctors and nurses who conscientiously object to abortion, extending this as a statutory right to Northern Ireland.
It is time to remove Victorian, misogynistic stigma from our abortion laws. My aim is simple—women able to choose what happens to their own bodies: confident, not criminalised, supported, not stigmatised; women able to access professional advice and medical care that is regulated effectively; and an Act of Parliament that is fit for now, not for 51 years ago, and certainly not for 157 years ago.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
Whatever Members’ differing views on abortion, if we respect devolution, we should vote against this motion. It proposes far-reaching changes in abortion law, not only for England and Wales but for Northern Ireland, where abortion has been respected as a devolved matter since 1921. Indeed, it would set a dangerous constitutional precedent of interference.
It is not only unconstitutional. It is untimely, at such a sensitive time in relations between the Westminster Government and the Northern Ireland Administration. It would completely undermine the substance and spirit of the Good Friday agreement, and it is unwanted. Northern Ireland is the most recent part of the UK to vote on abortion law, in 2016, and it voted by a clear majority to retain its law as it stands. The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) quoted statistics in her support, but let us hear what the people of Northern Ireland said just last week when asked. Some 66% of women and 70% of 18 to 30-year-olds there said that Westminster should not dictate this change to them.
If, however, the Province in time decides to change its law, that is for them, not for us here as MPs in Westminster to decide. Colleagues will no doubt recall the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland saying in the House recently:
“The Government believe that the question of any future reform in Northern Ireland must be debated and decided by the people of Northern Ireland and their locally elected, and therefore accountable, politicians.”—[Official Report, 5 June 2018; Vol. 642, c. 220.]
That was specifically in respect of abortion. She has also said that
“it would not be right for the UK Government to undermine the devolution settlement by trying to force on the people of Northern Ireland something that we in Westminster think is right”.—[Official Report, 9 May 2018; Vol. 640, c. 661.]
Those sentiments were reinforced by the Prime Minister, when she said:
“Our focus is restoring a democratically accountable devolved government in Northern Ireland”.
In that clear respect, this motion is contrary to Government policy and should be voted down.
Can we in all conscience vote on the one hand tomorrow on a Bill to
“Facilitate the formation of an Executive in Northern Ireland”,
as its long title commences, respecting the authority of that Executive to make decisions on such issues as roads and infrastructure, and then on the other hand today seek to deny Northern Ireland that authority on a matter of such fundamental social significance as abortion? We cannot, and we must not.
Whatever the views of Members across the House on abortion, they should hear what a number of Northern Irish women who wrote to me said:
“Changing the law in Northern Ireland at this sensitive political moment on this sensitive political issue is bad for devolution everywhere.”
The hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) has said from the Scottish National party Benches:
“The decisions of devolved Administrations are taken for reasons that people in those devolved nations understand from their point of view”—[Official Report, 5 June 2018; Vol. 642, c. 228.]
Or, as Ruth Davidson, who is in favour of changing the law on this issue, more bluntly puts it:
“as someone who operates in a devolved administration, I know how angry I would be if the House of Commons legislated on a domestic Scottish issue over the head of Holyrood”.
This motion is an ignoble endeavour to take advantage of a temporary Executive lacuna and to foist legislation unconstitutionally on to the people of Northern Ireland. In so doing, it would radically alter our own abortion laws here in England and Wales.
Although the Bill has yet to be published, let us look at what it would do. It seeks to permit a woman up to 24 weeks pregnant to obtain an abortion for any or no reason at all—abortion on demand up to five months of pregnancy. We already have some of the most extreme abortion laws in the world, but this would make them even more so. There is no public call or appetite for this whatsoever. Indeed, it is the opposite; there is clearly grave public concern. Apart from Brexit, I have had more cards from constituents asking me to vote against this ten-minute rule Bill than on any other issue in this Parliament. Only 21% of women in England and Wales want an extension to our abortion laws, and less than 2% of them are in favour of sex-selective abortion, which the Bill would legalise up to 24 weeks. It is no good the hon. Lady arguing, as she has, that clinicians’ regulations or practice could cover that issue. The fact is that if her proposals go through, sex-selective abortion will not be illegal in this country up to 24 weeks. Do we want to go the way of Canada, which is now described as
“a haven for parents who would terminate female foetuses in favour of having sons”?
Do we really want to support a Bill—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. The hon. Lady must be heard. If she wishes to put the matter to the vote, which I believe she does and which is entirely proper, the House will then cast its judgment, but she must be heard with courtesy.
Fiona Bruce
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I do want to put the matter to a vote.
Do we really want to support a Bill that could remove the only opportunity that many women have, often at the most vulnerable stage, to speak confidentially and one-to-one with a doctor about their concerns on abortion and what their alternatives might be? If we really trust women and want them to make the most informed decision and give them the best support we can, surely we should not take away this important legal safeguard. The bottom line is that if there is an abusive relationship, and there is no legal requirement for a doctor’s involvement and no need for a reason to be given for an abortion, it is far more likely that a vulnerable woman will be pressurised into having an abortion by an abusive partner. This Bill does not improve protection for vulnerable women. It reduces it.
The hon. Lady talked about the legislation being out of date, but should we reinforce, as this motion proposes, an outdated 24-week time limit when babies are consistently surviving now at 22 weeks, and some even at 21 weeks and a few days? The Bill is out of step with scientific progress and public opinion. Some 70% of women want this time limit lowered.
In recent weeks, lobbyists supporting this motion, as the hon. Lady said, have said that the UN has called for this change. The UN has done no such thing. The lobbyists for this change cite a report by a minor UN sub-committee, which does not have any standing to rule on the UK’s legal obligations in this respect. As for the non-binding judgment of the Supreme Court, which has also been used to justify this motion, there is nothing in that judgment that could remotely be said to give rise to anything approaching a requirement for the Bill. As Lady Hale said there, we in this place do not have to act.
We should not act, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland, on this issue—not only because it would be unconstitutional, though that is enough, but because the complex ramifications of this proposal, which have clearly not been thought through, would result in contradictory and inconsistent results in different parts of the UK. Those are too detailed to be debated here, but Northern Ireland would in fact be left with a total legal void, with no law covering, for example, the place where an abortion could occur and no legal requirement for abortions to be restricted to legally approved hospitals or clinical settings—abortions for any reason or no reason in any place.
The permanent secretary of the Department of Health in Northern Ireland was asked this year,
“What is the situation if the 1861 Act was to be repealed in the UK?”
His answer was:
“This scenario would leave abortion unregulated in Northern Ireland.”
The best people could hope for there would be some guidance from the Department of Health. The hon. Lady places great reliance on regulators, but regulators do not have the standing of law, as we have recently seen in cases of regulatory failure by the Care Quality Commission. Regulation cannot replace legislation. Taking the responsibility for abortion out of the hands of elected representatives and putting it in the hands of unaccountable medical bodies would be a derogation of our responsibility as Members of Parliament.
To close, I repeat that as Members of Parliament, we must respect our devolution settlements, and particularly in this instance that of Northern Ireland. Whatever Members’ views on abortion, we must vote against this proposal. It is unconstitutional, legally incoherent, untimely and unwanted.
Question put (Standing Order No. 23).
Civil Liability Bill [Lords]
Tuesday 23rd October 2018
(6 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Civil Liability Act 2018 View all Civil Liability Act 2018 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 23 October 2018 - (23 Oct 2018)
15:00 - The House divided: - Ayes: 240 / Noes: 287 - Question accordingly negatived.
15:15 - The House divided: - Ayes: 243 / Noes: 288 - Question accordingly negatived.
17:31 - The House having divided: - Ayes: 243 / Noes: 298 - Question accordingly negatived.
19:00 - The House divided: - Ayes: 294 / Noes: 238 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss new clause 2—Small Claims Track: Children and Protected Parties—
‘(1) The Small Claims Track Limit in relation to claims made by children and protected parties for whiplash injuries may not be increased unless the increase is to an amount which is not more than the value of £1,000 on 1 April 1999 adjusted for inflation, computed by reference to the consumer prices index.
(2) In subsection (1),
“children” means any person or persons under 18;
“protected parties” means any person who lacks capacity to conduct the proceedings;
“lacks capacity” means lacks capacity within the meaning of the Mental Capacity Act 2005’.
This new clause would limit increases in the small claims track limit for those suffering whiplash injuries to inflationary rises only, for people who are either children or people lacking capacity to make decisions for themselves (as defined in the Mental Capacity Act 2005).
Gloria De Piero
We are again confronted with the reforms in the Bill, which will cost the NHS at least £6 million a year and taxpayers at least £140 million a year, the Government admit. Even they accept that it will result in more than 100,000 injured people not pursuing a legitimate claim that they could pursue now; we say the figure is far higher. Insurers, meanwhile, will get an extra £1.3 billion of profit every year. The Government say that they will hand 80% of that to consumers in the form of reduced premiums, but they have said that before, and insurers have saved over £11 billion since the last Government reforms in this area, in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. Despite a brief dip in 2012-13, premiums are now higher than ever.
The Government have moved a little on the Bill, and in Committee the Minister confirmed what he intimated on Second Reading: that vulnerable road users will be exempted from both the Bill and the small claims limit. That is welcome. As Labour has done repeatedly throughout the process, we will attempt today to make the Bill fairer still by setting out some key amendments.
New clause 1 would ensure that the whiplash small claims limit could be increased only in line with inflation based on the consumer prices index, and it follows Lord Justice Jackson’s recommendation that increases should come in £500 increments and only when inflation justifies them.
One of the most disappointing aspects of this package of reforms is the Government’s attempts to sneak through key changes to the small claims track limit through the use of statutory instruments. Today we want to give those changes the scrutiny they sorely deserve and put them in the Bill.
Whereas the threshold for getting legal representation for personal injuries is currently £1,000, the Government are trying to raise it to £2,000 or £5,000, which will make a massive difference to someone injured through no fault of their own. That position is supported by a raft of experts, including some in the Minister’s own ranks—the Tory Chair of the Select Committee on Justice for one. The White Book, which I took the trouble of sharing with the Minister in Committee, shows that there was an effective 20% increase in the small claims limit in 1999 when special damages were removed from the calculation of the limit. I note that the Lord Chancellor conceded in his letter to the Chair of the Justice Committee dated 15 August 2018 that 1999 is the correct date from which to calculate an increase.
It is worth pausing at this point, since the Government now accept that there was a significant change in 1999, to understand what that change meant. An example is given in paragraph 26.6.2 of the White Book:
“a claim for £4,000 for loss of earnings and other losses, plus a claim for £800 for damages for pain and suffering, is a claim which would be allocated to the small claims track”.
In layman’s terms, a claim may be made for under £1,000 for pain and suffering, but when losses and expenses are added in it could be considerably greater. The example in the White Book suggests that, if an £800 pain and suffering award has a losses and expenses claim of £4,000, although the total value of the claim is £4,800, it still falls into the small claims track. We are talking about claims far in excess of the small claims limit.
Lord Justice Jackson, in his review of civil litigation costs, all the recommendations of which the Government accepted and implemented in the 2012 Act, said in paragraph 1.3 of chapter 19 of his 2009 review:
“Personal injuries litigation is the paradigm instance of litigation in which the parties are in an asymmetric relationship.”
In words that we all understand, this is David versus Goliath. Sir Rupert Jackson went on to say that
“the only reason to increase the Personal Injury small claims limit would be to reflect inflation since 1999”
and that
“I propose that the present limit stays at £1,000 until inflation warrants an increase to £1,500”.
He could not have been clearer, yet the Government appear to have plucked the proposed £2,000 limit out of thin air.
The new clause states that the CPI, which is used for the uprating of pensions and benefits paid to injured workers, should be used to calculate the small claims limit. Even the Chief Secretary to the Treasury agrees that CPI is the way to go. She said earlier this year to a House of Lords Committee:
“CPI is a much better measure of inflation…we are seeking to move away from RPI”.
The Governor of the Bank of England agrees, too. He has said:
“We have RPI, which most would acknowledge has known errors. We have CPI, which is what virtually everyone recognises and is in our remit.”
It is perfectly clear what we need to do: enshrine CPI as the key measure in the Bill.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on getting the Government to admit that the increases are arbitrary and not linked to inflation in any way. Is it not the case, therefore, that the only reason for the increases is to prevent injured people from getting representation and thereby preclude people with meritorious cases from getting the damages that they deserve?
Gloria De Piero
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Even if we use RPI, the Government still do not get to their proposed £2,000 new small claims limit. Instead, using the flawed RPI from 1999 would take the £1,000 to roughly £1,700. That is what we on the Labour Benches suspect is going on here.
Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)
The hon. Lady is making an argument about whether RPI or CPI should be used, but is there not a bigger point here? For almost all claims generally, outside this area, the small claims track limit is £10,000. If we are to be consistent, is there not a case for making it £10,000, the same as everything else?
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Surely the only gainers here are the insurance companies. Most people, because legal aid has been reduced, cannot afford solicitors.
Gloria De Piero
Exactly. I do not think anybody in this House will want to shed a tear for those insurance companies whose profits are going up and up. In 2017, profits for Direct Line went up 52% to £570 million and Aviva recorded a profit of £1.6 billion—and I have not even talked about the packages that some insurance company bosses take home.
The Government appear to have rounded this figure up. We say base the figure on the advice and recommendations of countless experts and follow the evidence. Even if the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) does not listen to me, I wish he would follow the evidence of the experts. New clause 1 does just that. It would increase the limit only by CPI since 1999 and limit any increase to £1,500. That way, injured people with significant injuries and potentially even more significant losses will get the representation they need and deserve.
Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that in the case of an accident at work it is even more important that an injured employee is able to get legal representation to take a case against their employer? The employer will be armed with lawyers and their employers’ liability insurance company. That is stacked up against an individual whose task will be hard enough. They will be feeling victimised enough as it is.
Gloria De Piero
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is not an easy thing to take a case against your boss. You need a lawyer to hold your hand, an expert to talk you through, and the Government’s proposals are going to make that so much more difficult. She makes an appropriate point.
New clause 2 would ensure that children and protected persons, for example those lacking mental capacity, are treated the same as other vulnerable groups by excluding them from the small claims limit increase for whiplash injuries. Having made a welcome concession on Second Reading, and clarified in Committee that they would exclude vulnerable road users from the impact of the Bill and secondary measures on the small claims court limit, the Government appear to have forgotten others. Horse riders, pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists are rightly to be excluded from the changes, but some of the most vulnerable in our society, who are currently recognised by the courts as requiring special status, will be left, with everybody else, facing a new small claims limit of £2,000 or £5,000. As it stands, any settlement awarded to those who lack capacity to conduct their own proceedings, such as children or someone suffering with a mental disability, must be rubber-stamped by a judge because of the claimant’s recognised vulnerabilities. That will continue to be the case after these changes are introduced.
The law requires children and other protected people to have a litigation friend to conduct proceedings on their behalf. In the small claims court, those who provide this required representation are not and will not be paid for their time. Yet by increasing the small claims limit, there will be a significant increase in the number of people coming through the small claims court with higher-value and more complex cases, where they need a lawyer more than ever. We are asking a litigation friend to take on potentially complicated matters for those most in need, on their own, in their own time, for no pay. Injured horse riders, cyclists and pedestrians and motorcyclists will not be subject to a tariff. The small claims limit for them will remain at £1,000, meaning that they will get a lawyer to act for them for free in any case over that value.
Can the Government not see that children and protected persons need this support, too? How on earth can the Government justify protecting one vulnerable group but not another? Why is the horse rider worthy of exemption, but not a child or a person without the capacity to conduct proceedings? Are we really willing to let some of the most vulnerable people in our justice system be left simply to hope for the good will of others to protect their interests because we in this House have failed to do so?
I know that the Minister is aware of this issue from discussion in Committee with my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous). The Minister suggested returning to this point and that he would be very interested to see an amendment tabled. So here is his chance: a ready-made amendment that makes a simple correction and is an opportunity for the Government to rectify what I presume is an oversight. It simply extends the exemption already provided to others. It removes children from the changes being made to the small claims limit or tariff, and ensures that protected groups are excluded from the increase, the same as horse riders, cyclists and pedestrians. It removes the double standard of some vulnerable road users being granted an exemption and others not. Ultimately, it does little more than extend the protections already afforded to some and allow the Government to show that they care for all.
Chris Philp
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for calling me so early in this debate. I rise to oppose the Opposition’s new clause 1, which seeks to prevent the Government or any other public body from increasing the small claims track limit in relation to these personal injury cases, particularly road traffic personal injury cases, above £1,500.
I strongly oppose the measure. I touched on one of the reasons for doing so in my intervention on the shadow Minister earlier. For the vast majority of general commercial claims and indeed personal claims, the small claims track limit is £10,000. The reason it is as high as £10,000 is that some level of materiality is applied to the claim in question. The view taken by Parliament in the past, rightly, is that matters below the £10,000 limit should be sufficiently simple for a small claims track procedure to be used without the involvement of often very expensive lawyers.
In response to my intervention, the shadow Minister, before she was distracted by another intervention, drew attention to the fact that these are personal injuries. I accept that point, of course. However, the fact of their being personal injuries is not germane, in my view, to the question, which is: is the matter sufficiently simple to be adjudicated via the small claims track rather than through lawyers? That is the question—not whether the matter is serious or not serious but whether the matter is sufficiently simple to be dealt with properly by the small claims track rather than through lawyers. That is why I think there is a strong a case, on the grounds of consistency, for a £10,000 rather than a £5,000 limit.
Ruth George
In road accident claims and particularly in employment liability cases at work, establishing who is to blame for an accident is far from simple. It is an extremely different sort of case from that of establishing whether a fridge was working or not when it was bought, or whether there is something wrong with a car. I really think the hon. Gentleman is not doing justice to the victims of personal injury accidents by the arguments that he seeks to make.
Chris Philp
Of course the £10,000 small claims track limit applies to a far wider range of issues than simply whether a fridge functions or not. The hon. Lady mentions as an example the question of culpability for a road traffic accident. Given that we are talking about much less serious types of injury if the limit is, say, £5,000, determining responsibility for that road traffic accident does not need to be an enormously complicated procedure. For those of us who have been involved in such road traffic accidents, the minor ones we are talking about here, determining responsibility is not a highly complicated matter. I accept that, in much more difficult cases where very serious injuries have been suffered, one must of course take a lot more legal care and attention. For very minor injuries, however, where by definition the accident is a minor one, I suggest that determining responsibility and culpability does not need to be an extremely complicated matter.
Andy Slaughter
With the greatest respect, I do not think that the hon. Gentleman knows what he is talking about. Given of the relatively low levels of compensation for injury, the effects of a £5,000 injury can be quite severe and debilitating over a period of time. The complexity of personal injury cases, which involve expert evidence and issues of causation, means that they are in a different category. Even the Government accept that, so he is batting on a rather poor wicket.
Chris Philp
The hon. Gentleman’s arguments are ones that the legal community often advance, whether in this arena or others, to justify very high levels of legal and judicial intervention, which is often very expensive. We need to maintain a sense of proportionality, lest legal costs and expenses get out of control.
Chris Philp
I shall in just a moment. I have seen figures suggesting that 47% of the pay-outs made by insurance companies for these relatively minor road traffic injuries get consumed by legal fees. If such a high proportion of pay-outs is being consumed by expenses, it suggests to me that the entire system is out of proportion, and that some reform is therefore needed. I give way to the Chair of the Justice Committee.
Robert Neill
I am afraid that my hon. Friend is not making the best case on the Government side that I have ever heard. Does he accept that lawyers act in the interests of their clients and that when they do, they are bound by professional obligations? Is not a better point that we should assist people through the system by working up a very good and accessible online portal, which the Minister has sought to do, so that we find the means of balancing cost with people’s ability to seek access to justice? I gently say to my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) that that is perhaps a stronger point that the Government have been able to advance. The Minister has taken care to delay the implementation of aspects of the Bill in order to get the online portal up and working, and I suggest that that might be a more fruitful area to consider.
Chris Philp
I am always delighted to take advice and guidance from such a distinguished, learned and experienced Member as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill). He adds further weight to the case by drawing attention to the benefits of the online portal, which I hope could be used to further simplify such matters and enable claimants to manage them, rather than having to rely on lawyers.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Is the hon. Gentleman aware that in most personal injury claims, there are fixed costs for lawyers’ fees?
Chris Philp
In many cases there are, but in many cases those costs inflate. I referred to the fact that 47% of the value of pay-outs get consumed by legal fees. I hope that the fixed tariffs provision, which is not the subject of any amendment but is in the Bill, will further simplify matters.
One reason why we have a problem that needs solving in this area—new clause 1 would inhibit that solution—is qualified one-way costs shifting, which was introduced a few years ago. I understand why it was introduced—the shadow Minister referred to David and Goliath—but under a system of qualified one-way costs shifting, unless the respondent can prove quite a high level of intention, deceit or malfeasance, the claimant’s legal costs are borne by the respondent in any event, even if the claim is dismissed. That creates significant moral hazard, as it means that claimants can bring claims, even if those claims have relatively little merit, safe in the knowledge that they, or indeed their advisers, will never have to bear the cost of the claim. It is a one-way bet, which means that claimants may as well just have a go and see what happens. The number of cases in which a claimant is shown to be so egregiously fraudulent that they have to pay the cost is extremely small. This one-way bet—this free option—that the legal system now provides is one of the reasons why there has been such an explosion in claim numbers.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
I should declare that I chair the all-party group on insurance and financial services. I agree with my hon. Friend’s opposition to the new clauses. Does he have any thoughts on why personal injury claims have risen by 40% over the last decade, yet during the same period, cars have become safer and accidents have reduced by nearly a third?
Chris Philp
My hon. Friend is right—he makes exactly the point that I was about to come on to. Over about a decade in which accidents have reduced by 30% and cars have become safer, the number of claims has gone up by 40%. He asks why, and I think it goes back to qualified one-way costs shifting. There is a huge financial incentive for claimants to have a go—encouraged, of course, by claims management companies—in the hope that they can make a successful claim. Defendants, typically insurance companies, have rather irresponsibly taken the view that because defending one of these claims—probably successfully—will cost £10,000 or perhaps more, they should simply choose to settle, which may involve paying out £3,000 or £4,000, without bothering to defend the claim. Obviously word has spread both in the claims management community and among the wider public that people can simply make a claim and the insurance company will settle, because it is cheaper for them to settle a bad claim than to fight it. That has created the most extraordinary perverse incentives. Insurance companies have been seriously at fault, as they have set up this situation by paying out for claims with no merit, for understandable commercial reasons, but they have made a big mistake, and we now have to correct it through the Bill.
My hon. Friend asks why the number of claims has increased so dramatically. It is because claims management companies have been phoning around, encouraging the public to submit fraudulent claims, and I will elaborate on that in a moment.
Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman makes my point for me in saying that insurance companies are paying up on a regular basis. They are not even defending these claims, yet the Bill is designed to protect them. What does he say about that?
Chris Philp
The companies are not defending the claims because qualified one-way costs shifting makes it more expensive for them to successfully defend a claim than simply to pay it out. The system simply is not working.
Sir Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)
Does the hon. Gentleman think that any genuine claimants will be hit by this measure and will not receive the compensation that they should get?
Chris Philp
The right hon. Gentleman raises a fair concern. Of course, we need to make sure that we do not overcompensate and find ourselves in a situation in which genuine claimants are prevented from claiming. The way in which we are legislating strikes that balance and genuine claimants can still make a claim. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst referred to the use of an easy-to-operate online portal as a way of ensuring that claims can be handled easily, even by laypeople. The concern that the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) raises is reasonable, but I think that the Government have addressed it in their handling of the matter. However, I am sure that the Minister will comment further on the right hon. Gentleman’s point.
Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)
This might be a peculiar counter-intuitive point, but it is often the case that whiplash claims are associated with bad headlines in the press. People think that the numbers of claims are dramatically exaggerated. Perhaps it might be helpful if we send a message from the Chamber about discouraging fraudulent claims, which would mean that people with a genuine claim would be more likely to have their cases dealt with more quickly.
Chris Philp
As always, my hon. Friend makes a very good point. As Members of Parliament, we should send out a clear message to our constituents and the wider public that making fraudulent claims is not a victimless crime. They affect the insurance premiums that all of us and all our constituents pay. Fraudulent claims are extremely bad for society as a whole. They encourage a sense that people can somehow get money without really deserving it, which is morally corrosive as well as financially damaging.
Jo Stevens
I am sure that no one in the Chamber thinks that we should encourage fraudulent claims—absolutely not—but may I bring the hon. Gentleman back to some facts? Between 2015 and 2017, the number of registered claims for whiplash fell by 15%, while the number of claims being reported through the police also fell, which might have something to do with the 37% reduction in the number of road traffic police officers in the last 10 years.
Chris Philp
Clearly the number of injury claims made via an insurance company is not related to the number of police officers on the street. The hon. Lady mentions the slight but welcome reduction in the number of whiplash injuries. Over the same period, the number of claims to insurance companies for back injuries has increased, so the total number of claims is down only very slightly over the last couple of years, and is still dramatically up over 10 years, which is clearly a more meaningful period. When the two are taken together, therefore, there has not been a significant reduction.
Robert Neill
The House will know about my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am glad that my hon. Friend has mentioned claims management companies. Would he agree that some of the concerns about balancing access to justice with discouraging fraudulent claims—we all agree about them—would be met by continuing to revise and strengthen the regulation of claims management companies, which are not regulated to the degree that solicitors are, and in particular by bearing down on the employment of paid McKenzie friends—non-qualified, quasi-lawyers who are particularly rife in the claims management sector? Will he work with me in persuading the Government to move swiftly to ban them?
Chris Philp
Once again my hon. Friend makes a very good point—two very good points, in this case. The operation of claims management companies, which have been actively engaged in encouraging the public to commit fraud, has had an extremely negative effect in this area. I want an outright ban on them making cold calls, but I am slightly concerned that even if the Government take all the action that he and I would like, these people, being extremely adept in such matters, would adapt their behaviour to circumvent the legislation and regulation. For example, they might start making cold calls from outside the UK’s legal jurisdiction, as we saw following the ban on referral fees that came into force two or three years ago. Insurance companies were banned from receiving referral fees from claims management companies, but some insurance companies and claims management companies sought to circumvent the ban by setting up what they euphemistically termed “alternative business structures”, whereby the claims management company effectively remunerated the insurance company via an equity stake rather than a referral fee. I am therefore concerned that even if we take all the action we can, these often rather dubious characters will find new and ingenious ways of circumventing the legislation.
Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)
I welcome the fact that the hon. Gentleman supports an outright ban on cold calling by claims management companies, but does he agree that the Government’s measures in the Financial Guidance and Claims Act 2018 do not go that far? Rather than punishing injured victims, would it not be far better to introduce that outright ban on claims management companies’ cold calling?
Chris Philp
As I said a moment ago to my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, an outright ban would be welcome—it might be something the Government are looking at in any case—but because these people are so ingenious at circumventing even the best-written rules and regulations, there would still be a problem.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way—he is being most generous with his time. May I press him on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) about McKenzie friends? I am going back years now, but in my day, when I first started at the Bar, the concept worked very well: they were volunteers who accompanied people to court and assisted them, and they certainly were not paid. Surely we just need to go back to the system as was, as I suggest that things would then work very well.
Chris Philp
I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend, who I know has a distinguished legal background. Both he and the Chair of the Justice Committee have powerfully made the point that McKenzie friends should be voluntary and unpaid. I hope the Minister heard that excellent recommendation, which has now been made by two learned hon. Members of this House.
Sir Edward Davey
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on making a speech against the Bill. He has admitted that the insurance companies should be fighting the claims, that McKenzie friends should not be paid and that claims management companies should be regulated. He might not have realised it, but he has defeated the Bill by himself.
Chris Philp
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for granting to me such wide-ranging powers of persuasion, but I am not speaking against the Bill; I am speaking only against new clause 1. Despite all the measures we have just been discussing, including the three that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, I do not think that they, on their own, will be enough, for the reasons I have outlined. The financial incentives created by qualified one-way cost shifting will remain, and claims management companies will find ways of circumventing any tightening of the rules that might be legislated for separately. There is no question but that the British public are being incited to submit fraudulent claims on an industrial scale—[Interruption.] The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), is tut-tutting and shaking his head in a way that leads me to believe he disagrees with that statement—I think that I have fairly summarised his view.
Chris Philp
I was about to reply to the shadow Minister’s implied disagreement, but go on then; I give way.
Eddie Hughes
I just wondered if my hon. Friend would comment on a previous interaction between me and my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) about stock car racers, who obviously are involved in multiple collisions and yet do not seem to suffer any whiplash, or at least not to the same extent as others. In addition, people in Greece make far fewer claims than we do in the UK. Will he comment on that?
Chris Philp
Once again, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Not only has the number of claims for such injuries dramatically increased over the past 10 years, at a time when the number of road traffic accidents has fallen, but they are far more prevalent here than in other European jurisdictions—not just Greece but countries such as France and Germany. Could it be that British necks are weaker than French and German necks, or could it be that our system encourages fraudulent claims?
Ruth George
The hon. Gentleman, who is making an excellent speech, has answered his own question. He has talked about the prevalence of claims management companies and the way they are inciting people to make claims on an industrial scale. Surely those claims management companies, and the insurance companies they are linked to in most cases, should be bearing the brunt of this problem, not the innocent victims of accidents, as would be the case under the Bill.
Chris Philp
The hon. Lady evidently agrees that claims management companies have been inciting fraud on an industrial scale—a point of view that her Front-Bench colleague perhaps disagrees with. That said, claims management companies are only part of the problem. As I said, the incentives inherent in the system have encouraged the kind of behaviour I have been describing.
I want to come to the implied sedentary disagreement from the shadow Minister earlier. I inferred from his gesticulation that he disagreed with my suggestion that claims management companies were inciting fraud on an industrial scale. I will start with a personal anecdote, which I realise does not make the general point, but I will then come on to that more general point. My interest in this area stems from personal experience. About three or four years ago, just before being first elected, I had a minor road traffic accident while driving along the M5 to Cornwall with my wife and our two small children. [Interruption.] I think I am being heckled by the Chair of the Justice Committee.
Nobody was injured in the accident—the bumper was a bit dented, but that was it. It happened at low speed, the traffic having slowed down. For about a year, however, I was bombarded with calls to my personal mobile by people from claims management companies, I think, that had somehow found out about the bump, trying to persuade me that I or my family had suffered a neck injury. No matter how often or how insistently I told them that everyone was fine, they would say things such as, “If you just say your neck hurts, you’ll get £3,000.” The incitement to commit fraud was clear and direct. Subsequently, as recently as in the last two or three months, I have received repeated automated calls—robocalls—again to my mobile, although wholly unrelated, I think, to the first set of calls. I received a recorded message saying, “We are calling about your accident. Do you want to talk about it?” There was then a pause during which I was expected to reply. That is clearly happening on an industrial scale.
Jo Stevens
Who does the hon. Gentleman think sold his details to that claims management company?
Chris Philp
In the first instance, it was very likely to have been an insurance company that had been circumventing the referral fee ban through an alternative business structure, which is a practice that I wholly deplore, and I encourage the Government to ban it. However, as I have said three or four times before, simply trying to legislate away claims management companies will not in itself be enough when the incentives inherent in the system are so powerful. Raising the small claims track limit to, say, £5,000—which is still half the level of the general small claims track limit—will serve to diminish the financial incentives in the system whereby lawyers are taking nearly half the value of pay-outs.
Several hon. Members rose—
Chris Philp
I give way to the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter).
Andy Slaughter
The proportion of fraudulent claims is about 1%. If I understand the hon. Gentleman’s argument correctly, he is saying that all meritorious claimants should be debarred from proper representation so we can identify that 1%, because it is too difficult for the Government to legislate. Is not the truth of the matter that the Government, as always, are joined at the hip to the Association of British Insurers, and are simply legislating in its interests?
Chris Philp
I disagree with all three things that the hon. Gentleman has said. First, as I said earlier to the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey), the Government have no intention at all of preventing legitimate claims from being made. The Government are keen to facilitate those claims, and the online claims portal will help with that. There is categorically no intention of disbarring, preventing or in any other way inhibiting legitimate claims from being made.
Secondly, the hon. Gentleman referred to the 1% fraudulent claims figure. The reason the reported figure, which in my submission is dramatically under-reported, is so low is that insurance companies are, quite wrongly, choosing to settle those claims—even suspicious claims, even claims without merit—without defending them, because the cost of defending them, which is about £10,000 or £15,000, far exceeds the value of the pay-out. So the 1% figure cited by the hon. Gentleman goes nowhere close to reflecting the true scale of fraudulent claims in this area.
Sir Edward Davey
Will the hon. Gentleman respond to a general point? Does he believe that when we are tackling a problem, in any aspect of society, we should deal with the symptom or the cause?
Chris Philp
Of course we should deal principally with the cause, and that is what the Bill seeks to do. [Interruption.] The right hon. Gentleman asked about causes. We can talk about claims management companies and we can talk about referral fees—those are important issues to deal with—but the cause of this problem is the financial incentives created by qualified one-way costs shifting, whereby claimants, aided and abetted by claims management companies, can have a crack for free, suffering no loss if their unmeritorious claims are dismissed. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to go into the cause of the problem, that is the cause of it, and elevating the small claims track limit to £5,000 will do a great deal to eliminate the cause. If he wishes to address the cause, as his intervention implied, he should vote against new clause 1.
Several hon. Members rose—
Chris Philp
I give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle.
Huw Merriman
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again. It is not just the case that we do not really know the number of fraudulent cases, although we can certainly make a very fair estimate, given that there are 200,000 extra claims and 85% of them relate to whiplash. The real issue is that we tend not to see any medical reports because of the settlements. It is not just that the cases are not defended; we never see the medical reports, so we do not know exactly what the full figure would be.
Chris Philp
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Because the claims are settled upfront by the payment of, typically, £3,000 or £4,000, there is often no medical examination. There is therefore no evidence on which to assess whether the claim was fraudulent or not, which is why the 1% figure cited by the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) is essentially meaningless.
One of the other provisions in the Bill, which we debated on Second Reading, is the requirement for a medical examination to take place before an offer is made. That is an essential reform. In response to an intervention from me, the Secretary of State for Justice confirmed that such medical examinations would have to be face to face. That would begin to address the issue that my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) has rightly raised.
Jo Stevens
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way to me again; he is being very generous. He mentioned the purpose of raising the small claims limit to £5,000, and what that would do. What it will do is deny victims of injury access to justice, as the Government’s own impact assessment expressly states.
Chris Philp
I do not accept the premise of the hon. Lady’s intervention. I think that in the case of the smaller claims, whose value is less than £5,000, it is perfectly possible and perfectly reasonable for individuals to submit their own claims—these are relatively simple matters—using the online portal to whose importance my hon. Friend hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst drew our attention earlier. Members have also referred to the role that unpaid McKenzie friends can play in assisting members of the public who submit claims. I do not accept the suggestion that bona fide claims will be prevented or inhibited by the proposed reforms.
Several hon. Members rose—
Chris Philp
The hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) has tried several times to intervene, so I must give him an opportunity to make his point.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because he has been generous. May I put a different scenario to him, because this aspect of what he is saying is confusing me? If, in the course of his employment, a resident of Glasgow South West were injured in Croydon South, why would he be treated less favourably because the injury was sustained in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency than he would be in the constituency of Glasgow South West? In Scotland personal injury claims are exempt from the small claims limit, and civil legal aid is available to claimants.
Chris Philp
I infer from the hon. Gentleman’s question that these matters are devolved in Scotland. Is that the case?
Chris Philp
The two cases are treated differently because there is an entirely different legal system in Scotland, and there is a devolved Government there. It is perfectly within the competence of that devolved Government to take a different view. Clearly the Government in Scotland, and the Scottish Parliament, have taken a different view, as they are entitled to do so, but I, as an English MP—as a London MP—take my own view, and it is the one that I have been expressing here today.
Chris Stephens
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that, but does he realise that the Bill affects 407,000 people—Scottish residents who are employed in England and Wales?
Chris Philp
It may well affect residents of Scotland. Of course, it also affects residents of France, Germany, the United States and Kazakhstan who may choose to visit my constituency. I strongly encourage all of them to do that, by the way. If, heaven forbid, they were to suffer an injury in Croydon South, they would be equivalently affected. The mere fact that there are different rules in different jurisdictions is no reason not to change the rules in this one. Which jurisdiction is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that we align ourselves with? Scotland? France?
Chris Philp
While I admire the hon. Gentleman’s patriotism in inviting us to follow the Scottish example, I am afraid that this Parliament will form its own view on what is appropriate, and I do not think that he can be in any doubt about what I think the right view is on the question before us today.
Ruth George
The hon. Gentleman is indeed being very generous. However, he constantly claims that the injuries sustained in road traffic accidents are minor. Written into the Bill is that an injury caused by the
“rupture of a…tendon or ligament in the neck, back or shoulder”
that lasts for up to two years will be included within the limits. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that sort of “minor injury”, which could affect people for such a large portion of their lives, should be included?
Chris Philp
The Government consulted extensively on the definitions before legislating. I understand that the definition to which the hon. Lady has referred was recommended by the Sentencing Council, and I would certainly not wish to second-guess or naysay the recommendation of such an august institution.
I did not quite have the opportunity to finish a point that I was making in response to the hon. Member for Leeds East who, some moments ago, was expressing disagreement with my suggestion that claims were being farmed on an industrial scale. I have given my own personal example, but I also want to submit to the House, in support of what I said, an example uncovered by The Sunday Times in July 2015. It involved a company called Complete Claim Solutions, which was based principally in Brighton but also had an office in the Borough of Croydon—although not in my constituency, I hasten to add. It was discovered to be systematically encouraging members of the public to submit fraudulent claims. It was such a disreputable organisation that it used the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” as an instructional video illustrating the kind of behaviour it considered appropriate. This is no small company; it was responsible for making no fewer than 7 million outbound calls per year. One of its salespeople, Tom Murray, was recorded boasting to a journalist from The Sunday Times that he was able to easily persuade the public to lie. He said that
“if they want that £2,000, they’ll lie.”
He also said:
“When it comes down to a woman who’s had an accident…I’ll make her cry”
as a way of persuading her to make a claim.
That is just one example of the shocking behaviour of these claims management companies, in this example one making 7 million calls per year.
Several hon. Members rose—
Chris Philp
I have taken up a great deal of the House’s time. [Interruption.] I am glad that I have at last said something that finds favour with the Opposition Front Bench. I am sure many other colleagues wish to contribute to this debate.
There is overwhelming evidence that our system is broken, in terms not only of the claims management companies and the use of alternative business structures to get information into their hands, but of the fundamental incentives inherent in qualified one-way costs shifting. The proposals the Government are contemplating to increase the small claims track limit will do a great deal to choke off this problem at source—to deal with the cause, as the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton requested a few moments ago. For that reason I will be energetically and enthusiastically voting against new clause 1.
Ellie Reeves (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I welcome the opportunity to try to counter the worst aspects of this Bill by speaking to Opposition new clauses 1 and 2.
Access to justice may sound like a catchphrase or buzzword, but it underpins so much within our society, and it should not be bandied about and dismissed with the cavalier attitude currently shown by this Government. The Bill will cause a regression in the ability of genuinely injured people to seek compensation and justice for their injuries. The narrative of wanting to clamp down on fraudulent claims has long worn thin and the statistics the Government are using to justify these policies are entirely erroneous. Of course fraudulent claims are wrong and should be investigated and clamped down on, but we are not experiencing the epidemic levels we have been repeatedly warned of. In 2017, 0.22% of all motor claims were proven to be fraudulent; bearing in mind that that is for all motor claims, whiplash injuries will be an even smaller percentage.
Instead of looking at empirical evidence to create legislation, the Government are using disputed statistics to legitimise their agenda. This is wrong, and the impact on access to justice that the Bill will have will be substantial: 350,000 injured people without the free legal cover they are currently able to access. That is the true cost of implementing the Government’s package of measures.
As I outlined on Second Reading and in Committee, the changes to the small claims limit—although not on in the Bill, they are intrinsically related to its content—will be utterly damning on any reasonable definition of access to justice. The proposal to increase the small claims limit from £1,000 to £5,000 in road traffic injury cases and from £1,000 to £2,000 in all other personal injury claims would mean thousands of injured people could fall out of scope for free legal advice and representation and could be denied justice. Costs are not recoverable from the losing party in the small claims court, so injured people will either have to pay their legal costs themselves, which is likely to be cost-prohibitive, or, more likely, forgo legal assistance altogether, or simply not pursue a claim.
In giving evidence during the Justice Committee’s inquiry into the small claims limit, the Minister in the Lords, Lord Keen, suggested that injured people could instead seek advice from their citizens advice bureau. I am sure that many Members will understand the great number of cuts that have befallen citizen advice bureaux in recent years, and this suggestion is not only unfeasible but is completely out of touch. If there is to be any change in the small claims limit, it must be done proportionately by pegging it against consumer price inflation.
Ellie Reeves
I want to make some progress.
That this must be done in this proportionate way is a widely held view, and those who advocate the approach include the Justice Committee, which published a recommendation in its small claims limit report in May; trade unions, including USDAW; the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers; the Law Society; and over 50 Members of this House who have signed my early-day motion calling for the increase to be in line with CPI inflation. These disproportionate and misguided hikes are, it seems, favoured only by this Tory Government and the insurance industry.
New clause 1 in my name and those of my hon. Friends would limit increase in the whiplash small claims limit in line with inflation and permit the limit to increase only when inflation had increased the existing rate by £500 since it was last set. By linking any rise to inflation, it would remove the power from the Lord Chancellor to determine the level and would instead tie it to an economic measure used by both Government and the Bank of England. The Lord Chancellor has an important role, but it is not one that should be afforded powers to artificially dictate rates such as the small claims limit for political reasoning or motivation. If we remove the politics from the decision-making process by using a widely recognised measure such as CPI, people, whether insurers or injured people, can have confidence in the system. It would provide certainty and clarity, be easy to track and would allow stakeholders to adjust for subsequent rises accordingly.
Complementing new clause 1, new clause 2 would firm up the proposal made by my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) in Committee that would limit increases in the small claims limit for children and people lacking capacity to make decisions for themselves. The Minister stated in Committee that vulnerable road users will be excluded from the Bill and from secondary measures on the small claims limit. This is welcome, but it is disappointing that no Government amendments have been tabled on Report to shore up that promise and include it in the Bill immediately. I hope that this is not a repeat of the Government’s promise to pass the predicted £1.3 billion-worth of insurance industry savings on to customers. I am afraid that the amendment in Committee on that issue was little more than a fudge, and its effect on customers’ premiums will be negligible at best, while the aggressive changes in the draft tariff system will involve reductions of up to 87% in payments for pain, suffering and loss of amenity from road traffic accident-related soft tissue injuries. Under the proposed tariffs, people will be compensated more for a flight delayed for three hours than for being injured for three months. The widely held and understood values of access to justice should not be undermined on a whim to satisfy the insurance industry.
What these Opposition new clauses highlight above all else is the true damage this Bill will do to access to justice and the principles that uphold the right to access to justice. In Committee, I warned the Minister that the changes made by the Government’s package of measures will be similar in scope to the disproportionate implications of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012—LASPO—and the unlawful introduction of employment tribunal fees, both of which are key pieces of Tory legislation that have done nothing but remove the rights of many people in seeking access to justice. What we have been left with is an 84% fall in civil legal aid and a 68% fall in the number of employment tribunal cases as a result of these Tory policies.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that this is part of a wider package of pressure on people who have some of the lowest incomes in our society? I wish to be associated with her new clauses and her points, and does she agree that the Government’s proposed measures are part of a wider package of pressure on the most vulnerable people in society?
Ellie Reeves
I agree with my hon. Friend. This is yet another attack on ordinary people’s access to justice. Should the Bill pass its remaining stages today, those shunned by LASPO and tribunal fees will be joined by an additional 350,000 injured people who will be left without the free legal cover they can currently access.
John Howell
I thank the hon. Lady and fellow Select Committee member for giving way. She has talked about access to justice, but she has not mentioned at all the impact of the online courts. Does she have a feeling about what sort of effect that would have for increasing access to justice?
Ellie Reeves
I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point.
The Bill will have a significant impact on access to justice, and we know that the portal system is nowhere near ready to accommodate the changes. It has not been properly tested. Under successive Tory Governments, access to justice has fast become a luxury available only to the few. A recent survey showed that 63% of Unison members would not proceed or be confident to proceed with a claim without legal representation. The small claims limit changes in the Bill will push nearly two thirds of genuinely injured people away from pursuing a claim if they do not meet the arbitrarily imposed criteria dictated by the Lord Chancellor. The idiom of adding insult to injury has never been more apt, and it is surely time to think again.
Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
I have done something a bit novel: I have listened to what has been said in the debate, and my remarks will focus on that. I did not come here with a prepared speech; I came here and listened to the contributions from both sides.
I would like to start by responding to the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) and taking up a couple of points that she made. The first relates to the idea that the Government are somehow doing this because of special pleading from the insurance industry and that they are somehow in bed with the industry. The aim of the Bill is to reduce premiums for individuals. That is the focus of the Bill. If I were the insurance industry, I would want premiums to go up, but the aim of this package of measures is for premiums to go down for ordinary people. I therefore do not agree with her assertion.
Another point that the hon. Lady made was that the setting of the limit by the Lord Chancellor, or any future Lord Chancellor, was arbitrary, unfair and unjust, but that is why we have this House and why we have Ministers. They are not here just to do interviews on the “Today” programme. We have Ministers to make judgments that they are then held democratically accountable for. I accept that Labour Members—or, indeed, at some point in the very distant future, Conservative Members, when they are sitting on the Opposition Benches—might dislike a judgment that is made by a future Lord Chancellor, but we settle these things through the democratic accountability of this House. To reject that principle and to suggest that every limit in any area of law, whether this or anything else, should somehow not—
Ellie Reeves
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He talks with great passion about the democratic accountability of this House. Does he therefore agree that any changes to the small claims limit should not be done by negative statutory instrument, as the Government are proposing, and that they should instead be debated on the Floor of the House?
Bim Afolami
That is an interesting point. I have served on many Committees, as we all have, and some have huge amounts of engagement from lots of Members while others have less. But this House is not just this Chamber; it is also all the Committee Rooms. Negative statutory instruments provide a way for significant amounts of secondary legislation—I do not know how many pieces of legislation; probably hundreds—to go through Parliament. I cannot agree with the hon. Lady 100% that using that procedure will always result in a lack of democratic accountability, because frankly, in modern government, it plays a significant part in our governance process. I recognise the point she makes, however, and it is fair to say that sometimes people do not pay as much attention in Committees as they might do, but that is fundamentally the case for this Chamber, too.
Ruth George
Does the hon. Gentleman therefore agree that, on occasions, statutory instrument Committees do not provide a democratic procedure, as in the case of the cuts to criminal injuries compensation in 2012? At the time, one Committee completely overturned the Minister’s proposals and asked for them to be brought back. A separate Committee was then reconvened, made up of Parliamentary Private Secretaries, and it railroaded through exactly the same criminal injuries compensation cuts. This House should not be seeking to use that kind of procedure for something that is so important to hundreds of thousands of accident victims.
Bim Afolami
I do not want to leave the House, or the hon. Lady, with the impression that I believe that statutory instruments are undemocratic. They are democratic, and they are a form of how we do things in this House. I was unaware of the case that she mentioned. The broader point is that getting primary legislation through, particularly in a hung Parliament such as this, will always be difficult—[Interruption.] No, primary legislation is not always the place where we make every single change. That is why we have a Committee system.
Bambos Charalambous
Is the hon. Gentleman aware that many of these claims companies operate on a no win, no fee basis? Therefore, if no payment is made and a claim is defended, the claimant will not be paid if they are defeated.
Bim Afolami
That is obviously factually accurate, but we need to ensure that we deal with the cause of these problems. As I have said, the Bill does not deal with everything, but it does deal with at least part of the problem. That, in and of itself, is a valuable thing.
Ruth George
The hon. Gentleman talks about the underlying cause that makes these changes necessary, as has the hon. Member for Croydon South. As they have both identified, that underlying cause is surely the fact that insurance companies should not be defending claims that could be fraudulent.
Bim Afolami
It is partly that, but the important point is that no single piece of legislation in this House can deal with every single problem. We can identify a particular problem and deal with it in a particular piece of legislation.
Huw Merriman
Does my hon. Friend agree that we can speak proudly from these Benches about the fact that civil litigation reform over the past few years has led to changes in no win, no fee, as well as to the banning of referral fees and the use of benefits by these companies? Government Members actually have something to say on this. Those changes have also led to a reduction of about £50 in insurance premiums.
Bim Afolami
I agree with my hon. Friend. I reiterate that the point of this legislation is to bring down insurance premiums for ordinary people by, I think, between 35% and 40%. I look to the Minister to check whether that is right.
Jo Stevens
The UK’s leading insurance companies earned more than £2.6 billion in profits in 2016, up on 2015. The proposed changes do not guarantee any reductions in premiums; they simply say that the premiums may fall. There is no guarantee that they will, and we know from previous Bills that this does not happen. Why does the hon. Gentleman suppose that things will be different this time?
Bim Afolami
I take the hon. Lady’s point. The industry has pledged to pass this on. My understanding is that premiums fell by an average of roughly £50 a year in 2012. When we talk about averages, we must bear in mind that if premiums were to fall by an average of, say, £35 under this legislation, the figure in some instances would be much greater—especially for young drivers, for example. Those are my remarks, based on what I have seen and heard today, and I commend this speech to the House.
Andy Slaughter
I did not intend to speak, therefore I will be brief. The House is being treated to ad hoc speeches, which are always a delight. They sometimes benefit from a little knowledge of the subject, I gently say to the hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami). I also urge him not to be quite so credulous of what insurance companies tell us because experience shows that they always say that premiums will go down, and sometimes they go down and then up again, and sometimes they do not go down at all.
I also wonder about the hon. Gentleman’s question of whether we can expect everything to be done in a single Bill. I would argue that the two main things that the Bill will do are to prevent people with meritorious claims and those with often serious injuries from getting into court, and, if they get there, to reduce the legitimate level of damages that they can expect to receive. Would not it be better to have a Bill that deals with a matter that probably everybody in the Chamber thinks is right to tackle: strengthening defences against fraud? There has already been some change in legislation to make it easier to defend fraud cases, yet one may ask why insurers still do not instruct lawyers—whom they are able to employ, unlike claimants, perhaps, after the Bill is passed—to defend those cases. Why do they not insist on medical evidence? Why do they in fact encourage fraud? Why does a proportion of insurance companies’ profits come either from selling information on, which perpetuates claims management companies, or from owning claims management companies themselves?
The problem with the Bill is that it has the wrong targets. I made that point earlier when I intervened on the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp). All Labour Members can be brief because he substantially made the case for why this is a bad Bill, as the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) said.
However, the hon. Member for Croydon South said that the limit should be £10,000, as if personal injury claims were the same as simple money claims, which no one has ever argued. We are arguing about a difference in what the limit should be. In employers’ liability cases, the difference is relatively small, but the difference in road traffic accident cases is substantial: between what inflation would provide—around £1,500 as a small claims limit—and £5,000, which the Bill proposes.
The Association of Personal Injury Lawyers said about the Bill:
“Claims under £5,000 are not minor, and an increase in the small claims limit will cover far more than soft tissue injuries. These claims could include a brain or head injury, injuries to the eyes, a collapsed lung, or fractured cheekbones. This is a disproportionate response to the stated aim of dealing with whiplash claims.”
That must be right. We are talking about people who are in a vulnerable condition, having suffered personal injury. As has been said, the inequality of arms is apparent not just in the courtroom but in the background to the case, particularly in the case of employees who take on their employers. That is often done with the assistance of a trade union, lawyers and other advisers. We should not replace that tried and trusted system with McKenzie Friends—whether unpaid or unpaid— who often do more damage than good to the clients they intend to represent. I urge the Minister, even at this stage, to listen not only to Opposition Members but to some Government Members and particularly to the Justice Committee.
I went through the painful experience of the stages of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, and I have therefore heard many of the arguments trotted out before. We went from a situation whereby legal aid was available for personal injury to no win, no fee cases, and now to qualified one way costs shifting—QOWCS. It is increasingly difficult even for those with the most meritorious cases to get representation. There is not the same availability of representation as there was.
The review of the law post-LASPO is due to report shortly. It will cover not only part 1 but part 2 of LASPO, and if we had waited, we could have seen the effect of the reform to civil litigation, but no, the Government wish to take a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The overwhelming majority—estimates are around 90% of road traffic claims—of cases will be taken out of a costs regime. That means that all those people have to sink or swim on their own. No one, not just the lawyers here, truly believes that it is easy for many people who have suffered accident and injury to navigate through the court system, particularly when they are opposed by an insurance company, with all the resources that it has.
The Bill will not benefit the motorist or the interests of justice. Above all, it will not benefit people who, through no fault of their own, have suffered often serious injuries. It is disgraceful that the Government are legislating once again in the sectional interests of the insurance industry and against those who have suffered injury.
Mr Simon Clarke (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Con)
I rise to support the Bill and speak against new clauses 1 and 2 because, whether through ending rip-off energy bills, freezing fuel duty or increasing the personal allowance for income tax, the Government’s constant focus has been to make sure that the consumer is at the heart of their work and to reduce the cost of living for millions of people.
I am therefore pleased that Ministers have identified another area in which the cost of living is artificially and unfairly inflated. At a time when our cars and roads are safer than ever, one would expect the price of motor insurance to come down. Instead, the opposite has happened. Since 2010, there has been an almost 50% increase in the cost of comprehensive insurance premiums, and a near 80% increase in the cost of third-party fire and theft insurance premiums.
Ruth George
Does not the hon. Gentleman agree that the rise in the cost of insurance is, as we have heard in the debate, down to insurance companies not tackling possibly fraudulent claims, thereby creating the problem and making huge additional profits? Does he accept that consumers are also victims of accidents and will be severely affected by the Bill?
Mr Clarke
The hon. Lady is right to say that insurance companies have a duty to tackle fraudulent claims—that is certainly the message that the Government would send out and that I endorse—but the proportion of such claims is relatively small. We need to get the incentives in the system right so that the most serious cases receive the compensation and the attention that they deserve in the legal system and that the less serious cases receive a proportionate response. Whiplash is a horrible injury, which can be very severe, but we must ensure that the incentives in the system are not so skewed as to push all cases into the most extreme bracket. That simply does not reflect the nature of the injuries that are being suffered and it is not in the country’s public policy interest to have insurance rendered hugely more expensive, which the current system does.
Ruth George
Is the hon. Gentleman saying that the tariff for compensation for injuries, which judges currently use, is unfair and overcompensates people with more minor injuries? It covers a range of injuries, not just whiplash.
Mr Clarke
I am saying that there is a need for a proportionate system for compensation. The number of road traffic accident-related personal injury claims has increased by 200,000 since 2006—a rise of approximately 40%. That suggests to me that the incentives in the system are skewed. Insurers predict that, without reform, motor premiums could continue to rise at a rate of about 10% annually. That constitutes a significant burden on the cost of living for millions of us who are dependent on our cars for daily travel, especially in rural communities.
Jo Stevens
Does the hon. Gentleman not think that the UK’s leading insurers paying out £2 billion to their shareholders in 2016 might have something to do with the rising cost of insurance premiums?
Mr Clarke
The Bill is designed to make sure there is a closer connection between whiplash claims and medical evidence by introducing a ban on seeking or offering to settle whiplash claims without the appropriate medical evidence. That will discourage fraudulent claims, encourage insurers to investigate claims properly and protect genuine claimants from accepting a settlement without knowing the full extent of their injury.
Bambos Charalambous
Madam Deputy Speaker, is it appropriate for me to speak to new clause 2?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
For the sake of clarity, yes, you may speak to new clause 2.
Bambos Charalambous
I support new clause 2, which is in my name and in the name of other hon. Members. I am concerned that the Bill takes away the protection for children and protected parties such as people with a mental capacity disability.
Under the current civil procedure rules, children and protected parties are required to have legal representation in court when there is a settlement following a civil claim. Children and protected parties are not excluded from the Bill as vulnerable road users. Prior to introducing the Bill, the Government gave exemptions to a small category of vulnerable road users, including cyclists and horse riders, but no such exemption was given to children or protected parties despite their being protected under rule 21 of the civil procedure rules.
The Government should exempt children and protected parties in accordance with rule 21, and the Minister’s own Department, the Ministry of Justice, is responsible for setting these rules. I raised this issue with him when the Bill was in Committee and, being a man of his word, he duly got back to me, but his response was disappointing. Part 21 of the civil procedure rules states that for a child or protected party settlement to be made it has to be with the approval of the court. The settlement has to go before a court; there is no issue of it going to a portal. For court approval, children and protected parties need legal representation.
The Minister’s response to me suggested that the insurance industry would provide legal representation and that this would solve the problem. Except there would be a clear conflict of interest if the same party were paying for the legal representation of both sides. When choosing a litigation friend for a child or protected party, one of the criteria, under paragraph 3.3 of practice direction 21, is that the party seeking to represent the child or protected party as a litigation friend should have
“no interest adverse to that of the child or protected party”.
Clearly someone who is being paid by the insurance industry against the child’s claim cannot say that they have no adverse interest.
Sometimes children will be suing their parents in a road traffic accident personal injury case, meaning that the parents will have an adverse interest and cannot act for or represent their children. By not excluding children and protected parties from this Bill, the Minister is making a mockery of the current rules that govern personal injury in England and Wales.
Why should a child be able to access legal representation in a case where they have been injured at, say, an amusement park but not when they suffer the same injuries in a road accident? As things stand, the child or protected party would still have to get a legal opinion before the court makes a settlement, but the cost of the advice would not be recoverable from the negligent defendant, or their insurer, in cases subject to the small claims tariff. Why does the Minister want to take money away from children and protected parties in order to benefit insurers?
There are complexities in these cases, and legal representation is needed more than ever in matters involving children and protected parties. I cannot understand the Government’s logic or rationale in excluding horse riders and cyclists from this Bill but not children or protected parties. Are they saying that injuries suffered by children and protected parties through no fault of their own should be treated less seriously than injuries suffered by cyclists or horse riders? This goes to the heart of the Bill, which is ill-conceived and drafted solely from the point of view of the insurance industry and not of innocent victims who make a claim.
It is shameful that the Government are willing to sacrifice the interests of innocent injured children, and to take away the protection they currently have, enshrined in law, to give the multi-billion pound insurance industry an even bigger advantage in court.
Ruth George
I rise to speak to amendment 1. This Bill was drafted at the behest of the insurance industry, as is clear from every speech in favour of it.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
I think the hon. Lady is speaking to new clause 1, rather than amendment 1. We would not want people to be confused.
Ruth George
I beg your pardon, Madam Deputy Speaker.
New clause 1 would amend some of the worst failings of the Bill, which has been drafted at the behest of the insurance industry over several years. The industry has failed to tackle fraudulent claims. We have heard from hon. Members on both sides of the House this afternoon that the industry, which is responsible for so many of the claims management companies and for passing information on to them, is producing the problems that the Government are now seeking to address by further victimising the victims of accidents.
The insurance industry is making billions of pounds of profit and will make a further £1.3 billion from this Bill through the reduction in claims. Victims of accidents are not the people who tend to go to court. Those who lose will be denied access to justice, as both the impact assessment and the excellent report from the Justice Committee make clear.
It is a huge undertaking for a layperson to take a case to court. Most would not even dream of it, especially a case against their employer, who will be armed with their own lawyers and often with an insurance company, which will also be armed with its own lawyers. Unison, the public sector union, surveyed its members 60% and said they would not have taken a case against their employer to get the compensation they deserved for their injury at work if they had to take the case on their own without the support of a lawyer.
It is extremely difficult to determine liability in the case of many accidents at work, especially in instances like those I saw when I worked for the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers. Deliveries are made to stores by a third party and there are incidents in warehouses that may be the fault of one party, the fault of another company or the fault of the employee. Those arguments are exceedingly difficult to pin down, especially for an individual claimant, and they require the assistance of a lawyer.
The Government assure us there will be an easy online portal for claimants to register a claim. I am sorry, but I am a member of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions and we were told that there would be an online portal for universal credit, yet 47% of claimants are unable to access the portal. An online portal is, of itself, not an easy thing to access, particularly for people for whom IT is not their natural sphere. I ask the Minister to commit the Government not to roll out these changes to the small claims limit until the portal has been demonstrated to be easily usable by at least 95% of those who seek to use it. I hope that that commitment will be made during the passage of this Bill because, as we have heard, the portal is nowhere near ready and even the pilots have been found by firms of lawyers to be difficult to access.
The arguments made in favour of the Bill have been about the cost of insurance but, as we have heard, that cost has been rising at the same time as insurance companies’ profits have been rising. It is not the cost of personal injury claims that has increased insurance; those bodily injury claims have actually reduced by £850 million since 2013. A large degree of the cost rises has been due to the costs of vehicle damage, which have become far higher in the last five years—nearly £700 a year more—because cars are more complicated.
The Bill has been introduced, it is claimed, to crack down on whiplash claims, but it covers far more than simply whiplash. The definition of whiplash itself has been extended far beyond a medical definition, to include all injuries to necks and backs that relate to rupture or strain of muscles, tendons or ligaments lasting up to two years. I hope that no one on either side of the House would feel that such injuries are minor. The Bill also deals with accidents at work, public liability claims and medical negligence. USDAW has estimated that five times as many cases would be caught by this small claims limit as are caught currently. According to the TUC, only one in seven workers make a claim against their employer for an accident at work. So we can see that this move will have a severe impact on the number of claims being made.
Jo Stevens
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill will make workplaces more dangerous? I know from experience that, if employers are litigated against as a result of accidents in the workplace, they review their safety policies and make workplaces safer. This Bill will have the opposite effect.
Ruth George
I absolutely concur with my hon. Friend’s point, which I raised with the Health and Safety Executive, whose laboratory is in my constituency. It concurred that one of its major concerns is that without claims being made against employers they will cease to militate against risk in the workplace. That is just one of the many problems the Bill will cause, both for victims of accidents and for all other employees in the workplace.
The Minister has heard many examples this afternoon of how the Government could crack down on fraud and on the costs of insurance without cracking down on innocent victims of accidents. The requirement in the Bill for medical reports prior to offers being made is an important one, which all sides are supporting. We hope that the Government would seek to assess the impact of that change before impacting on victims. We have also heard many calls from Members on both sides of the House for claims management companies to be acted against because they are obviously playing the system and we need to make sure that that cannot continue.
This Bill is seeking to make the innocent victims of accidents pay for the fact that insurance companies are not prepared to crack down on fraud and so have come to this Government seeking their help. We have no guarantee that insurance costs will fall, but we do know that insurance companies will make £1.3 billion more a year out of this legislation and that innocent victims of accidents will suffer. I very much hope that the Minister has listened to the arguments being made on both sides of the House today and will accept the new clause.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Rory Stewart)
Let me begin by paying tribute to the high quality of debate today from hon. and right hon. Members on all sides of the House. This has been a serious business. The consultation on the issue began in 2012 and the detailed measures we are debating today were announced in the Budget in autumn 2015. There are disagreements on every side of the House, which are expressed in new clauses 1 and 2, but, more generally, I hope that everybody in the House will recognise that the Bill has been adapted as we have listened a great deal to suggestions made by the Opposition and others. I pay tribute to the hon. and right hon. Members on all sides who pushed for the changes we have introduced on vulnerable road users, on the new role of the consultation with the Lord Chief Justice and on definitions, particularly in respect of whiplash. I also pay tribute to what happened in the other House, where this legislation was considerably revised and improved by efforts from Cross-Bench peers, as well as Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative peers.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that claims against employers above £2,000 are taken outside the scope of this? It is right in those circumstances, where it can be difficult to make the claim stick, that people should be entitled to recover their costs in the event of a successful claim. Does he agree that making that change was a critical improvement to this Bill?
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, which should, to some extent, reassure the hon. Member for High Peak, some of whose arguments rested on damages in the workplace. The rise to £5,000 does not relate to damages in the workplace. As has been pointed out, it relates only to whiplash injuries suffered in a vehicle.
Robert Neill
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I take on board his point that the appropriate test for a small claims regime is complexity or otherwise, but will he recognise that there is a risk that perceived complexity might make claimants vulnerable to the operations of claims management companies, which do not have the high standards and good regulation of personal injury lawyers, as he rightly recognises? What safeguards do the Government intend to put in place beyond this Bill and more generally to make sure that we do not have a displacement effect from well-regulated personal injuries lawyers to unregulated, unscrupulous claims managers of the kind to which my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) and others referred? What more can we do to safeguard against that unintended consequence?
Rory Stewart
This is an issue on which my hon. Friend has been very thoughtful in his role as Chair of the Justice Committee. There are obviously three things that we are endeavouring to do and we are open to more ideas. One of them, of course, is that, through this package of measures, we disincentivise claims management companies from having a significant financial interest in pursuing this type of case. The second, as my hon. Friend pointed out, is the setting up of an online portal to reassure individuals that they will have a more predictable, more transparent and more straightforward system for pursuing their claims in person. Finally, through consultation with the judiciary, we are looking at the issue of paid McKenzie friends. We are waiting for the judiciary to report back so that we can take action on that issue.
Ruth George
The Minister claimed that raising the limit for workplace accidents to £2,000 would allay my fears, but given that USDAW and other unions have said that this will actually increase the numbers needing to go to the small claims court by five times, it certainly does not. There are still wide concerns around taking cases against employers, as he will know. Will he make any assurance that the portal will be tested, and that it will be ensured that an ordinary layperson can use it before any claims are implemented?
Rory Stewart
Clearly two different cases are being made here. On the question of the online portal, a very serious group of people, which includes insurers and lawyers, is testing it. One of the concessions that was made in the House of Lords—I think it is a good one—is to extend the time before this is rolled out by 12 months so that we have more time to make sure that the testing is done and that the portal operates properly. That is a good challenge.
The point about injuries in the workplace is that that, I am afraid, is outside the scope of the Bill, which is very narrowly defined to deal with whiplash injuries. Indeed, new clause 1 is also very narrowly defined as it deals with only the question of a “relevant injury”, which, in this case, is a whiplash injury. Therefore, while arguments about other forms of injury and employment are very interesting, they are not relevant to the debate on new clauses 1 or 2.
Moving on to the next question about simplicity and inflation, I just wish to point out that the previous Labour Government accepted the principle that inflation was not the only determinant of the levels that the small claims court should meet, because, of course, the small claims limit was raised from £1,000 in 1991 to £3,000 in 1996, and then to £5,000 in 1999 under the Labour Government before it was raised to £10,000 in 2013. Quite clearly those rises were well in advance of inflation and were driven, as indeed was the case for European small claims, by the notion of the simplicity of claims, not a change in either the CPI or the RPI.
Even if one were to accept that there should be a relationship to inflation, the mechanism proposed in new clause 1 seems to be a recipe for falling behind inflation. In effect, the proposal is that an increase should only take place if there had been a rise of at least £500, and should then be limited to £500. It would not take many years of slightly higher inflation than we have now to end up in a situation where, over a five and 10-year period, the increase would be considerably in excess of £1,000, which would then allow for a rise, but we would then find a syncopated system that, very rapidly, would be falling behind inflation.
The more fundamental point is a constitutional one. This is not an issue that is traditionally dealt with through primary legislation, and it is not an issue that is dealt with in the Bill. That is because increases to the small claims limit are properly an issue for the Civil Procedure Rules Committee, on which the Master of the Rolls, district judges, senior judges, personal injury lawyers—barristers and solicitors, including the president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers—and representatives for consumer bodies such as Which? sit. That is a better way of looking at the proper limits than trying take forward primary legislation on the Floor of the House. Technically, there is also another issue with the new clause, which is that subsection (4) should include paragraphs (a), (b) and (c).
That brings me to new clause 2. The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) quite rightly drew our attention to potentially vulnerable litigants, such as infants, children and other protected parties. He argues—on this we absolutely agree—that they suffer the same forms of injuries as any other human, and are entitled to fair compensation and the same degree of representation that would be afforded to any adult. At the moment, that is, of course, provided by the allocation of a litigation partner by the judge concerned.
The hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Ashfield asked what happens if that does not work and whether an increase in the number of cases would undermine that system. We have looked at this carefully, because the hon. Gentleman raised the matter in Committee. Our conclusion, having consulted a wide range of individuals, is that we do not believe that that would occur, but a number of safeguards are in place in the worst-case scenario. In most cases, an individual who is in that situation, such as an infant, would be represented by their parents. In a situation in which they were suing their parents, because the parents were, for example, driving the car, a litigation friend would be appointed by the court. In the case that they would be unable to find a competent adult who met all the criteria stated by the hon. Gentleman, including there not being a conflict of interest from that individual, it would be possible to appoint the official solicitor. In a case in which that, too, failed, judicial discretion remains to move the case of the infant out of the small claims track into the fast track, where the legal costs would be recoverable. Of course, judges would still have a very serious role to play in approving any settlement made to an infant or any protected party. That was why Lord Justice Patten made this ruling in the case of Dockerill v. Tullet:
“I can see no reason in principle why a small damages claim made by an infant should be taken out of the small claims track merely because of the age of the claimant. It is also clear that the premise on which CPR 45.7 operates is that the normal track for damages by infants will be the small claims track.”
That brings me to my conclusion. This very impressive piece of legislation has involved the upper House, the Opposition and civil society members throughout its Committee stages. The Government have made a number of very serious concessions to make the process more workable. I pay particular tribute to the Justice Committee for the pressure that it has put on us in relation to a very large number of issues, ranging from the online portal to paid McKenzie friends and vulnerable road users. We have now ended up with a Bill that does not do everything that was set out when the Lord Chancellor initially announced it in autumn 2015. Instead, with a series of realistic, focused and pragmatic compromises, we have struck the right balance between the protection of genuine claimants who have suffered genuine injuries, and the protection of different forms of public interest—in particular, the public interest of people, especially in rural areas, who need to be able to afford their motor insurance in order to move around. This Bill will remove unnecessary complexity, unnecessary costs and, in particular, the moral damage and hazard that currently exist in the form of claims management companies and a few unscrupulous individuals.
As Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood—the previous president of the Supreme Court—pointed out in the upper House, this country is now known throughout the world as a haven for unnecessary whiplash claims. Despite a significant reduction in the number of car accidents and an increase in vehicle safety measures over the past 15 years, if not over the last three, we have seen a significant increase in the number of whiplash claims, which can be accounted for only on the basis of fraudulent and exaggerated claims.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Gloria De Piero
I beg to move amendment 2, page 3, line 14, leave out clauses 3 to 5.
This amendment would remove the creation of tariffs for whiplash injuries and retain the existing system where judges decide compensation levels with reference to Judicial College Guidelines.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
With this it will be convenient to discuss Government amendment 1.
Gloria De Piero
Amendment 2 gets to the heart of our issues with the Bill and would remove the whiplash compensation tariff system altogether. We are dealing with human beings who experience pain differently, who have different lives and who will all be affected by a similar injury in a slightly different way. We would not accept a pricing of insurance premiums that did not take account of whether we drove a Mini or a Maserati, and we would not accept a standard payment for damage to a car, regardless of its state after an accident. Where is the justification for using such a blunt instrument as a tariff to calculate pain?
We all want to stamp out false whiplash claims, but why should HGV drivers, firefighters or parents driving their kids to school be treated like fraudsters claiming falsely for whiplash, left with tariff compensation and no legal help? As Lord Woolf, the eminent former Law Lord who carried out a review of civil justice after being commissioned by a previous Conservative Government, pointed out in the Lords:
“The effect of whiplash injuries, with which we are concerned, can vary substantially according to the physical and mental sturdiness of the victim. This means that the appropriate amount of damages for a whiplash injury can vary substantially... I suggest that they are not suited to a fixed cap, as proposed by the Government.”
He went on to say that a tariff
“offends an important principle of justice, because it reduces the damages that will be received by an honest litigant because of the activities of dishonest litigants.”
The Government’s proposals will punish the honest based on the behaviour of the dishonest, but how big is that dishonest group? The ABI said in 2017 that insurers paid out in 99% of all cases and that fraud was proven in only 0.22% of cases. Woolf decried the Government’s move to
“interfere with the Judicial College guidelines by substituting tariffs or a cap, which lack the flexibility of the guidelines.”
He went on in speaking against the proposed dismissal of a tried and tested system of justice to say that the Lord Chancellor
“is motivated, at least in part, not by the normal principles of justice as I understand them but by saving insurers money, in the belief that this will result in a reduction in premiums for motorists who are insured when they come to pay for their insurance.”
Later, he put it as strongly as simply saying:
“There is no precedent for this intervention in the assessment of damages in civil proceedings.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1593-1595.]
He went on to quote Sir Rupert Jackson, who said:
“It is the function of judges (not Parliament) to set the tariffs for pain, suffering and loss of amenities in respect of different categories of personal injuries”.
Lawyers who deal with such issues all the time have pointed out how people who are already suffering, and perhaps unable to earn a living due to their injury, will be worse off under the proposed tariff. They include experienced legal practitioners from the Tory Back Benches, such as Baroness Berridge, who said:
“I have met many a claimant for whom the difference in damages now proposed by the introduction of the tariff, taking some damages from four figures—£1,200 or £1,400—down to the likes of £470 is a significant matter for many peoples’ incomes up and down this country. I cannot have it portrayed that this might not make a great deal of difference to many ordinary people in the country.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1611.]
That is from a Government Back Bencher.
Alex Chalk
The hon. Lady is making fair points, but it is important to take into account that the claim may consist partly of a general damages component and also a special damages component. Does she agree that if the individual had, for example, been required to take time off work and had incurred costs—or losses—in the process, he would still be able to litigate and seek to recover those damages?
Gloria De Piero
The tariff system would mean that somebody who today was entitled to £1,200 or £1,400 would be compensated with far less. I am quoting Baroness Berridge.
Alex Chalk
We have to be really careful in this debate to draw a distinction between general damages, which are for pain, suffering and loss of amenity, as with whiplash, and special damages, such as the cost of taxis or lost employment. Does the hon. Lady agree that special damages will still be recoverable in the normal way and that we should not be confusing the two?
Gloria De Piero
I am choosing to focus on the injuries incurred. For a soft tissue injury lasting six months, an individual would today get between £2,150 and £3,810 but, if the Bill passes, they would get £805. I am choosing to focus my speech on those huge differences. That is the practical reality of what this tariff system will mean.
There is another important principle. It is a significant step to mess with the proud tradition of an independent judiciary in this country, and the Government should not take that lightly. The Justice Committee, too, could not have been clearer in its criticism of how the tariff system will harm access to justice. We hope the Government will listen to the Justice Committee and eminent judges—and, yes, us—and accept this amendment to remove the tariff system.
Mr Simon Clarke
It is a pleasure both to speak in support of the Bill and, unfortunately, against the amendment put forward by the hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero). It is really important that the Bill is proportionate in achieving the outcomes we want of ensuring that the public get the protection they need from injuries that can be so devastating, while at the same time compensating them in such a way that we do not burden the wider consumer with unsupportable bills. Earlier, I spoke about the fact that premiums need to remain affordable.
Amendment 2 would remove the ability to set a fixed tariff for whiplash compensation in regulations. As I mentioned earlier, the tariff system will ensure that claimants receive a proportionate level of compensation. This will significantly reduce and control the spiralling cost of whiplash claims and disincentivise unmeritorious claims. As with any such tariff system, I can understand the concern that it may not provide the flexibility necessary to ensure that compensation accurately reflects the true nature of someone’s injuries.
However, the Government have taken a number of important steps to ensure that such flexibility still exists. First, the tariff would not be flat for all cases, but staggered, depending on the severity of injury. Secondly, in addition to a tariff payment, all claimants will continue to receive special damages covering compensation for any actual financial losses suffered as a result of their accident. Finally, clause 5 gives the court discretion to deviate from the tariff in exceptional circumstances and when it is clear that a higher level of compensation would be appropriate.
This therefore seems to me to be exactly the type of Bill we should be bringing forward. It is sensible, and it does indeed allow us to provide the protection that people need, without the risk of putting up premiums. I do not believe that amendment 2 would achieve very much, other than wrecking the central point of the Bill, which as I say is to achieve such an upsurge in affordability.
Robert Neill
My hon. Friend makes a fair point. Opposition Members have referred to the Justice Committee’s report, but has he noted that although the noble Lord Woolf was indeed critical of the changes in the terms that have been quoted today, the noble Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, a former justice of the Supreme Court, did not have an in-principle objection to the tariff system? Does he agree that the devil in the detail is what will be in the regulations on the exceptional circumstances uplift and how that will apply? Is he, like me, pleased to see that there is a commitment to consult the Lord Chief Justice on those regulations, and does he agree that it is important that that consultation is real, thorough and detailed?
Mr Clarke
My hon. Friend speaks with the authority of not just a Select Committee Chair but someone who thinks deeply about these issues. There are safeguards built into the Bill, precisely to ensure that we achieve the robust, balanced and responsive framework that good legislation should aim for. I noted earlier that the Lord Chancellor will have a duty to keep all the relevant legislation under review on a triennial basis, so there will be checks to ensure that compensation thresholds do not become wildly out of kilter. Indeed, part of the reason why the Bill is necessary is that the thresholds have been allowed to drift for a very long time without being amended. That has led to a more dramatic uplift than is customary or than I would ever hope to see in future. We want to ensure that we always have a rolling programme rather than dramatic changes, which unfortunately affect more people than a more staged mechanism would. However, that does not mean that there is not a case for acting, so unfortunately I cannot support amendment 2.
Andy Slaughter
I will speak only briefly, because a number of the points to be made in this debate are the same ones that we made in the previous debate. There is no logic or sense to the Government’s rationale; they simply want to minimise the damages paid to litigants who have legitimate and in some cases serious injuries.
The noble Lord Woolf has been quoted several times. The Woolf report led to progressive and now legendary reform of the civil justice system, so he very much knows what he is talking about on this issue as on so many others. He said that the tariff
“results in injustice and it is known to result in injustice. Indeed, no one can deny that it results in injustice. There has never been a case where legislation deliberately introduces injustice into our law. It may be that it is only in regard to small claims, but surely it is important that we pause before we do that.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1620.]
I agree that the Government should pause, and I would say that there is an objection in principle to the tariff in this case. No good reason has been given why this should not be a judicial process rather than an administrative or politically affected process.
There is also an issue of quantum to consider. The proposed sums in the tariff are derisory for what are often quite serious injuries lasting for periods up to 24 months. An injury that lasts for two years is likely to be serious and is certainly a persistent one that will cause a lot of pain and suffering. It has been pointed out that at the lower end of the spectrum—nought to three months, which still includes cases of pain and discomfort lasting a significant time—the proposed sum is £235. The Law Society’s briefing compares that with the amount of compensation that somebody might get for a flight that has been delayed for three hours, which could be considerably in excess of that amount. As well as the matter of principle, there is the point that the actual financial compensation is being minimised for no good reason.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman talks about injustice. Is it not an injustice that many motorists are paying inflated insurance premiums because some people are getting an unreasonable level of compensation for their injuries? Is that not what the Bill is intended to prevent?
Andy Slaughter
It is not, because I do not know what the hon. Gentleman means by an unreasonable level of compensation—
Andy Slaughter
Please give me a moment to answer the first point, then I will willingly give way.
I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is saying that it is unreasonable because these injuries are exaggerated or fraudulent, or that people should not be compensated according to accepted judicial tariffs. Nobody has ever said—that I know of—that the levels of compensation that are awarded under the Judicial Studies Board guidelines are over-generous in this country. What we are doing is simply taking those realistic—some would say, rather parsimonious—levels and reducing them by a substantial degree, so I think the point is nonsense, frankly. However, I give way to the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow), who will make a much more sensible point, I am sure.
Rebecca Pow
On that point, from the general public’s point of view, there is a consensus that people are taken for a ride over all these claims. Many of them are encouraged to go into this system of claiming when perhaps they do not necessarily have a great case. A great deal of money is made through the legal system, and people want to see fairness. My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) is absolutely right: most people’s motor insurance is going up and up to compensate. Does the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) agree that that is not fair? What we are trying to do with the Bill is to introduce fairness to a system that frankly—many people would say—has got out of control.
Andy Slaughter
I congratulate the hon. Lady on getting a helter skelter of nonsense into one intervention, with every prejudice and false statement that has been made in the tabloid press about these matters for about the last 10 years—well done on that. I could make a long speech dealing with the specific issues of—[Hon. Members: “Go on!] We have got time, haven’t we? No, I will not. I could go into detail about some of the myths about whiplash and soft tissue injuries and what is actually happening in relation to accidents, the insurance industry and premiums, because I have been an observer of that for a long time. However, let me limit myself to a fairly narrow point.
I have listened to the arguments from Government Members, and they are just non-sequiturs, frankly. We have heard that insurance premiums are the issue. Let us imagine that we give the benefit of the doubt there, which I certainly do not, and say that premiums are likely to fall significantly and that that is a factor relating to claims rather than to insurance companies’ profits, the other activities that they indulge in and the way that their businesses are run. I do not accept that, but let us assume that we do for a moment.
The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) is no longer in his place, but he made a surprisingly illogical—for him—intervention. He said, “Look, people will still get special damages.” Of course they will get special damages, but special damages are what the name suggests—they are to compensate for specific items of loss. Why should the fact that someone still gets compensation for their loss of earnings or their medical bills, or something of that nature, mean that it is right to diminish their compensation for pain and suffering and loss of amenity? These are all non-sequiturs. The worst calumny of all is to say, “We are reducing the level of damages from slightly mean levels to absolutely parsimonious levels because of fraud”, which is exactly what we heard in relation to the small claims limit. So many members of the senior judiciary and indeed, of Select Committees, including not just the Justice Committee, but the Transport Committee, have said that it is plain wrong to say that because there may be instances of fraud, of which very few are identified, all litigants should suffer by having their damages reduced.
Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)
I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying about quantum, but I would be interested to know, theoretically, whether he objects to the idea of tariffs being appropriate for this sort of compensation. I remind him that Lord Brown said
“I am in broad agreement with the whole idea of tariffs for injuries, certainly for lesser injuries, and indeed even of reducing awards in respect of a number of these lesser injuries.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 10 May 2018; Vol. 791, c. 306.]
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that tariffs can be appropriate with, for example, criminal injuries compensation?
Andy Slaughter
There is an element of semantics going on here. We have guidelines at the moment. Judges do not pluck figures out of thin air. They look at the guidelines and hear submissions, or they would have heard submissions when representation was available—it seems it no longer will be—and they make a decision, but they have discretion around the individual circumstances of the case. That is a basic and fundamental principle of law, but one that we are deviating from. I cannot say strongly enough that that is wrong.
To add insult to injury—if I may put it that way—rather than taking the average in the guidelines and having a rough rule of thumb that someone will get a bit more or a bit less than their individual case deserves, or going for an average and calling that a tariff, we are saying that a tariff should be a tiny percentage of the current award. This is nothing but an attempt to say, “We do not wish to pay out money in this way. We wish to diminish both the ability to make a claim and the compensation paid.” Whatever one’s view on fraud, the massive majority of cases will be meritorious and honest cases in which people have genuinely suffered injury.
I will conclude with the words of the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Judge, on Report in the other place:
“What I cannot accept is a solution which means that a dishonest claim is handled in exactly the same way as an honest one. We cannot have dishonesty informing the way in which those who have suffered genuine injuries are dealt with. That is simply not justice. There should not be any idea that an honest claim for a whiplash injury made by the victim of a car accident should be less well compensated than an identical injury suffered by someone at work.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1600.]
That is what the Government are doing in the Bill and what is so inherently unfair, and they are doing it at the behest of special interests. They may genuinely believe that there is a problem to be resolved with whiplash. I could dispute that—we could go on for a lot longer than we are today—but even if they are right, there are other, better and fairer ways to tackle that issue.
Bambos Charalambous
Is my hon. Friend aware that under the criminal injuries compensation scheme someone gets £1,000 for a whiplash injury lasting six to 13 weeks but that under this tariff scheme the proposal is for £470 for three to six months?
Andy Slaughter
My hon. Friend, who knows far more about these matters than I do—and more, I suspect, than many on the Government Front Bench—is quite right. He draws attention to the fact that there is no logic in the system.
I feel a bit sorry for the Minister as he has to push these proposals forward; he is normally a very logical and fair man. It is difficult to speak at the Dispatch Box having been given a brief of this quality. When parliamentarians of his stature and of the stature of the hon. Member for Cheltenham, with his spurious points about special damages, are reduced to this level, and when Government Back-Bench Members are hauled in here, as we saw in the previous debate, to make speeches only to be told to stop making them because they are talking such arrant nonsense, one does despair. I hope even at the 11th hour that the Government might take pity on us, listen to the wise voices in the other place and support us on these amendments.
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
A number of the things that the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) suggested as being completely outrageous many of his constituents and certainly a lot of mine would completely agree with.
The Transport Committee, of which I was a member for three years, looked at this issue, and it was apparent even then that whiplash was a peculiarly British phenomenon. On the continent, particularly Germany, they do not have nearly as many whiplash injuries. I suggested at a previous stage of the Bill that this had nothing to do with the physiognomy of Germans as against that of British people. I made the point very clearly that I did not believe that their necks were more robust than good old-fashioned British necks. It was a flippant way of making a salient point: this is a national issue. In Britain, we seem to suffer from these injuries a lot more than people in other countries.
Rebecca Pow
My hon. Friend has made an amusing start to his speech. Is it not strange that while the number of traffic accidents has gone down, the proportion of whiplash claims has gone up? Is it that our necks have become flimsier? What does he put this down to? Do we not need to seriously address this issue, as we are doing in the Bill?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I am not an anatomist. I am not a biological specialist. I cannot give any scientific explanations for why our necks have become flimsier, or less sturdy, over the last 10 years. It may be related to obesity; I do not know.
This is, however, a serious issue, which has come up again and again over the last 15 years. As my hon. Friends have suggested, the number of claims has risen while the traffic accident rate has gone down. It is entirely legitimate for a Government, and, indeed, parliamentarians to ask what is going on. Something is not quite right. It is apparent that many people are making claims, which may or not be fraudulent—let us give them the benefit of the doubt—and clearly it often makes sense to an insurer to do a deal, as it were, and pay the money before the veracity or otherwise of the claim has been established, simply because the legal process would take too long.
Bambos Charalambous
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that by paying early, insurance companies are encouraging people to make these allegedly fraudulent claims?
Kwasi Kwarteng
The hon. Gentleman cannot have it both ways. It may well be the case that the companies are paying early, and clearly if they are paying early, people will be incentivised to make claims. The hon. Gentleman’s colleagues, however, are suggesting that no fraudulent claims are ever made, or that only a tiny proportion of claims are fraudulent. Logically, the more that insurers pay early, the more incentive there is to make a fraudulent claim. That is pure logic, and no great subtlety is required to appreciate it.
We have a problem. I think it entirely legitimate for insurers to pay out in order to forgo expensive legal costs. They have to manage their books and their businesses on a daily basis, and they will take a hit—if that is the right way to describe it—in order to facilitate business and manage cash flow. As we have heard throughout the debate, they are quite likely to make early payments, and as the hon. Gentleman has suggested, the more an insurer pays early, the greater incentive that gives someone to make a fraudulent or insubstantial claim.
Bambos Charalambous
Surely the answer is to fight those claims so that they do not succeed, and send the message that insurers will fight them and there will be no easy money for allegedly fraudulent claims.
Kwasi Kwarteng
If the hon. Gentleman were an insurer, managing a business on a daily basis, he would have to make a call every single day on which claims to fight and which not to fight. Often, for reasons of cost, the insurer will simply pay the money, without regard to the veracity or otherwise of the claim.
Rory Stewart
Does my hon. Friend accept that there is also the serious issue of asymmetry of information? In the case of injuries lasting less than six months, it is very difficult to prove through any medical means whether or not the injuries occurred, and therefore very difficult to defend against the claim.
Kwasi Kwarteng
In his usual philosophical way, the Minister has made an observation that goes to the heart of the problem. I opened my remarks by suggesting that insurers were very likely to pay out on claims early. He has made the point that even if it were possible to test the veracity or otherwise, it would be very difficult. Given the nature of evidence and the question of how it can be proved that an injury has actually been sustained, this will often resolve itself into an issue of one person’s word against another’s. The Minister has backed up my initial argument in his characteristically pithy way. The whole process is expensive, and for an insurer managing a business and managing a book, it is much easier and, I think, much more tempting to come up with an easy, quick-fix settlement or payment.
As the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) suggested, that in itself will incentivise and motivate claims that may be frivolous, which is a problem. He has eloquently described the circumstances in which fraudulent claims can be made, yet other Opposition Members are saying that such fraudulent claims are rarely if ever made. They are suggesting that all the claims are true and that somehow grave injustices would be perpetrated if, as often occurs across the judicial system, we were to set a tariff in this particular case.
Robert Neill
My hon. Friend is making some fair points. He says that this is not necessarily a role for judges, but would he conclude that while it may well be, as Lord Brown said in the other place, appropriate for Government to legislate for tariff-isation as a matter of policy, the views of the judges must be fully taken into account by way of consultation in setting what the level or quantum of that tariff should be and how it should operate and what practical impacts it should have?
Kwasi Kwarteng
My understanding given the nature of the Bill is that there is ample scope for a dialogue or conversation between judges—the judiciary—and the Government. However, what I am reluctant to see, and what I think many of our constituents and voters would be reluctant to see, is the power exclusively residing in the hands of judges. The Government have a duty of care to the taxpayers and to people who have insurance to try to keep these costs low. It is very funny to see Opposition Members frowning when I suggest the Government have a role to play. They are on the side of the political argument that believes in wholescale nationalisation; they want the Government to control everything. Yet in this particular instance they are expressing surprise and bewilderment, and I suggest that is completely spurious and fake.
Robert Neill
Does my hon. Friend agree that the logic of his position, which I understand, is that if we are to have credibility in taking this policy decision, those savings must actually be passed on to motorists? Does he recognise that there has been some cynicism about that in the past? We need to have mechanisms to measure very carefully that the insurance industry comes up to the mark, because it has not always had a terribly good track record in the past on that?
Kwasi Kwarteng
I agree with my hon. Friend. He is right that the insurance companies have in the past—I stress in the past—had a questionable record on some of these issues, but I repeat what I said on Second Reading: it is entirely unhelpful to bash the insurance industry or denounce it as a bunch of shysters who are ripping the public off. As I said in that debate, the insurance industry is one of our world-leading industries. We should celebrate it and be grateful for it: our insurance industry is a world-beating industry. There are not that many industries left in Britain that we can call truly world class, but the insurance industry happens to be one that is. It was nauseating and disconcerting on Second Reading—it has not happened so much today—to hear speaker after speaker on the Opposition Benches denouncing the insurance industry. They were scandalised that, God forbid, the industry should make profits, as though making a profit were in itself a moral crime. We have to try to shift the nature of the debate. The insurance industry is a world-beating industry. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) has suggested, we need to have some oversight to ensure that savings are passed through to the customers, our constituents.
Mrs Kemi Badenoch (Saffron Walden) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend aware that, according to statistics from the ABI, the myth about profit-making by insurance companies is a little bit overstated, and that motor insurers are actually not making a profit? The figures are being conflated with those of other parts of the insurance industry.
Kwasi Kwarteng
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. As any student of basic economics will know, in a highly competitive industry the ability to make extraordinary profits is severely reduced. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of insurers in our highly developed, highly sophisticated market. As I have said, we are a world beater in this area, and that means that we have lots of diversity in the insurance market. Lots of insurers are going bust, but many are making money because they are well managed. That is exactly what we would expect in a competitive industry that has reached a high degree of maturity, as the insurance industry has in this country.
Going back to the provisions in the Bill, I believe that the Government are trying to do a very measured and reasonable thing. We are trying to limit the fraud—or the escalation of whiplash claims to the point that they drive up pricing in insurance. We are also saying that we will engage with the courts, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst suggested. There is a role for the judiciary to play in this debate and in the management and setting of tariffs. Also, I would expect Opposition Members to be more enthusiastic about the fact that there is a role for the Government and the Lord Chancellor in ensuring that insurance premiums do not become excessive. There is absolutely a role for political engagement in the ability to cap a tariff, to ensure that premiums are low. This makes for a very reasonable and equitable set of demands, which is to be welcomed, and I hope that the Bill proceeds on its serene course through our Parliament.
Huw Merriman
It is a pleasure to contribute to the debate, and I am proud to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng). I freely admit that having a tariff system in place could well result in some people receiving less compensation, but that is exactly why I support the Bill. At its heart lies an acknowledgement by those on this side of the House that insurance premiums have got too expensive and that we have to look at measures to try to reduce them.
Let us look at the logic of the position. Cars now have much safer designs and there are fewer claims overall, yet we are seeing an extra 200,000 category claims, 85% of which relate to whiplash compensation. It strikes me as completely illogical to state that there is not an issue here, when the statistics are so counter-intuitive. Something very strange is going on. The analysis shows that it is impossible to ascertain whether these extra claims are genuine, because the nature of the legal system means that it is much cheaper to settle a case and never even consider any medical evidence or reports on whether there has been an injury. To a certain extent, we could say that that is no skin off the bone for the insurers, because the cost is always paid on to the consumer. I am surprised at the Opposition’s attitude in that regard because this is one of the principles that benefits the many—those who have to pay the insurance, which is mandatory—versus the few who abuse the system. I believe that the Bill is needed.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I know that my hon. Friend has a financial background. Does he accept that, if he were managing an insurance book, it would be very tempting—indeed, almost obligatory—to reach a settlement and to make the payments? Insurers are not being vicious or in some way prejudicial if they just pay the settlement. That is how a business is managed—it just has to cut its losses at some point.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is spot on. In the seven years before I came to this place, I managed the legal team that was unwinding the Lehman Brothers estate. In many instances, we looked to sue, but of course, we considered the cost of the claim and then worked out whether settlement was a better option. Settlement should always be a better option. For someone running a business, it will always be the better option if it is cheaper to settle than to pursue. All businesses operate in that manner.
It is all well and good for the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous), who is no longer in his place, to say that there should be a duty on insurers to take those cases forward, but they will not because it is not cost-effective. In addition, it is difficult to disprove those particular injuries.
Victoria Prentis
Does my hon. Friend accept that there is an emotional gain from settlement? Even those of us who are lawyers and enjoy the cut and thrust of the legal process know that bringing cases forward is a stressful experience for all claimants. It is important that we put energy and effort into making claims settlable at an early stage.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is right. When I was running the legal team, it always distressed me when we settled because, as a lawyer, I found the whole court process incredibly interesting, but those on the financial side insisted that we settle because that was the better business decision to make. However, my hon. Friend is right about the distress of individuals going through the process. Of course, insurers have to focus not just on the money, but on the valuable human resource implication—the manpower it takes to fight the claims.
That comes back to my point that it is not an issue for insurers if ultimately their costs are covered because the price of premium for everybody else goes up. It is no skin off the bone for them to settle, and that is what occurs. For change, Government action is required. Although I readily accept that a tariff situation is genuinely not to be found in common law, the position that we have got ourselves into means that we need to look at the system akin to the way that we consider the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, which fixes the tariff in the same way. That is not unusual if we look at our European friends such as Italy, France and Spain, where similar systems are in place.
I represent a largely rural constituency of 200 square miles. I have many younger constituents who find the price of insurance too great. Studies show that, for those aged between 18 and 21, 10% of their wage will be taken just to cover their insurance. In a rural constituency, there is no choice. If people do not have a car, they find it very difficult to travel. The bus services are not as they were and, without a car, people cannot get from A to B or go to work. That has a knock-on effect because 28% of my constituents are over 65—the national average is 17%—so I have a lot of older constituents who need looking after. We have high social care bills. If we lose our younger people to the cities because they cannot afford to travel around a rural constituency, the balance goes completely.
Kevin Hollinrake
Thirsk and Malton also has high social care bills, so I understand exactly what my hon. Friend says. His point about reducing the cost of premiums is very important but, fundamentally, the Bill’s provisions were set out in our 2017 manifesto. The measure is a manifesto promise, and amendment 2 simply wrecks a key premise of the Bill. That is contrary to what most people would expect when we have made a promise in our manifesto.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The amendment drives a coach and horses through the Bill. Yes, of course it is right to clamp down on those who claim fraudulently, and the Bill will act as an incentive for people not to do so, but the ultimate gain is that the money saved will go back into the pockets of those consumers who are currently being overcharged because of fraudulent claims. Like him, I intend that we legislate on all our manifesto commitments, this being one of them, which is why I support the Bill.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
What strikes me as perverse is that the original impetus for the initiative on which we are now legislating came from Labour Members. I remember Jack Straw waxing lyrical about the need to deliver what we are delivering now, and we are right to do so.
Huw Merriman
I lack my right hon. Friend’s longevity in this place to make such historical references, but it would strike anyone as common sense to look after the bulk of our constituents—our voters—by making sure they have more money in their pocket. We should all subscribe to that.
Kwasi Kwarteng
Does my hon. Friend agree that the insurance industry in Britain is something we should broadly celebrate? This idea that anyone is in cahoots with the industry, and that the industry is trying to rip off the public, needs to be addressed squarely and rejected.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is right. Britain is the leading country in the European Union when it comes to insurance. The top 10 insurers are based in London, and I celebrate this international market.
Of course, the insurance industry is very critical of the Conservative party for introducing and increasing the insurance premium tax, so any suggestion that this party does everything the insurance industry would like us to do is not backed up by our decisions.
It is undoubtedly the case that our cars are now much safer and that design and technology mean that injuries should not be as prevalent as we are seeing. We have also seen the growth of claims management companies, which have driven and fuelled claims. Sometimes we see such industries moving on from one sector to take advantage of another—holiday insurance is a good example; the claims management companies have already moved into that sphere. Equally, I would like to see more done with technology to address the ability of such companies to contact me and my constituents directly. People register with BT in order not to receive unsolicited calls, yet such calls still come through regularly. I hope that the technology will eventually keep pace and close down such calls.
I have made my points more than once, and I absolutely support the Bill. Although I can see that the Opposition’s intentions are good, if the amendment were accepted, it would drive a coach and horses through the very intention of this Bill, which is to reduce premiums for all our constituents and to make it easier for them to manage and live their lives.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
Although I originally studied law and was called to the Bar, I never practised, so I hope I may speak in the debate without being tied to any particular interest. This debate is increasingly showing a division between those on the side of personal injury practitioners, and those on the side of the overwhelming majority of our constituents who face the costs arising from an ever-escalating number of claims, of escalating value, for relatively minor injuries. My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) was right to draw the House’s attention to the remarks of the former Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw. If my memory serves correctly, he told The Law Society Gazette that he was in favour of banning compensation for soft tissue injury altogether. Clearly the Bill does not go anywhere near as far as that.
Kwasi Kwarteng
So a former Labour Lord Chancellor suggested that he would ban this compensation entirely. What on earth possessed him to suggest that as a policy?
Mike Wood
Reading through The Law Society Gazette, I see that Jack Straw’s actual comment was:
“Whiplash is an innovation of fertile legal minds which has no real foundation in medical knowledge. Everybody knows the vast majority of whiplash claims are completely unjustified. I support any measures to eliminate soft-tissue injuries.”
I understand that he was referring to compensation for soft tissue injuries, rather than eliminating the injuries altogether.
Hon. Members have spoken about the apparent paradox when we have the long-term reduction in the number of road traffic accidents, the increasing safety of more of the cars on the road and the long-term reduction in the number of deaths and serious injuries as a result of road traffic accidents, and yet the number of personal injury claims for whiplash and other minor injuries having increased significantly—it has gone up by 30% in 12 years. That enormous statistical increase cannot be dismissed as coincidental.
It has been suggested that the idea of a compensation culture is more about perception than reality, but how many of us have not had regular phone calls inviting us to claim for an accident that we have not had, encouraging us with the idea that a fortune was surely around the corner if only we referred the case to the firm that was ringing us up. I have no problem with solicitors—some of my best friends are solicitors, as they say. Indeed, many years ago my wife worked with one of the country’s leading personal injury solicitors’ firms, mostly doing administration on road traffic accident claims. But we need to look at the state we are now in. All the empirical evidence suggests that the initial intentions behind addressing no-win, no-fee claims for personal injuries have generated a spiralling increase in claims that are not the result of pecuniary loss—they are about not loss of earnings or quantifiable losses, but a figure being placed on pain, suffering and loss of amenity.
Previous studies have suggested that, contrary to what others have been saying, the amounts awarded by courts in England and Wales are significantly higher than those awarded in most other European jurisdictions for personal injury claims. When there is a serious injury, especially if the effects are permanent or long-lasting, or even if it results in disability, clearly no one disputes that it is right that there is compensation, especially for the loss of opportunity and amenity caused by that injury. However, shorter-term soft-tissue injuries do not really fall within that category. That is why it is proportionate for the Bill to introduce a tariff that sets out the amounts payable for certain categories of minor, non-permanent injuries.
Bambos Charalambous
Is the hon. Gentleman aware that, under the criminal injuries compensation scheme—one of the Government’s own schemes—a person can get £1,000 for a criminal injury of whiplash? Under these tariffs, however, someone would get £470 for the same injury, except it would not have been the result of a criminal event.
Rory Stewart
Does my hon. Friend agree that these discrepancies already exist, because the criminal injuries compensation scheme is, in fact, already an example of a tariff-based system? As those discrepancies have existed since 1962, nothing in the Bill changes their basic nature.
Mike Wood
The Minister, as ever, speaks straight to the point that bringing this system in line with the criminal injuries compensation scheme is actually making parallel systems more consistent, and it is entirely logical that they should operate on similar tariff-based systems. One of the flaws in the current system is that, as the Judicial College is setting its guidelines, the awards it uses for deciding the amounts in the guidelines are not the overall amounts that are payable in the event of a road traffic accident leading to personal injury, but are based on the awards made by the court in the relatively small proportion of claims that proceed to trial and are then adjudicated by a judge. The system does not consider the very large number of claims that are settled at an earlier date when the figure would tend to be lower.
Clearly, cases that proceed to full trial are more likely to be the more complex ones. This has the effect of institutionalising an inflationary element within the guidelines as they are reviewed, because the review is only ever based on those types of claim that actually end up being the higher awards anyway. It can only ever lead to an increasing amount. The impact of that falls clearly on our constituents. We rightly insist on mandatory motor insurance. As hon. Members have said, motor insurance premiums increase rapidly. One reason why they increase rapidly is that there has recently been a large increase in the average amounts paid out for personal injury claims. If we fail to take this sensible action, those amounts can only increase, and we can expect premiums to continue to increase at around 10% annually, quickly putting them out of reach.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I am delighted that my hon. Friend is making this point. What is his view on whether the Lord Chancellor should be setting the tariff? Does that not bolster what my hon. Friend suggests—that there is a role for the Government in trying to keep insurance premium costs low?
Mike Wood
Absolutely. Although I tend to argue for a slightly slimmer role for the Government, I do think that there is a place for them in this regard. When we insist on mandatory motor insurance, there is a clear role for the Government in ensuring that pressures on the price of that mandatory insurance are kept under control as much as possible. Having the Lord Chancellor’s oversight of the tariffs is one way in which we can ensure that the people who are already struggling with the escalating costs of motor insurance do not see them taken even further out of reach.
There is a clear risk of a serious moral hazard when it comes to escalating motor insurance. The more that premiums increase, the greater the risk—the greater the temptation, we might say—for some people to take the chance illegally to fail to take out motor insurance and to drive on our roads uninsured, with everything that that implies for safety and for coverage of third parties. Given the current high levels of motor insurance premiums, research suggests that around a quarter of 18 to 24-year-olds have been tempted to try to make savings by not taking out or not renewing their motor insurance policy—driving without insurance. Surely that number can only increase if the cost of motor insurance becomes ever more expensive and increases by far more than inflation or incomes.
As the real cost of motor insurance spirals, more people will be tempted to take the risk of driving without insurance, and young people are more vulnerable to this by far because their premiums are already so much higher. Such behaviour puts other people’s safety at risk and leaves them in an even more difficult situation in the event that they need to make a claim. The number of claims against uninsured drivers increased significantly last year.
The measures in the Bill are designed to keep insurance premiums under control, which is essential if we are to have a functioning motor insurance system. That is why I am not able to support the amendment, why I shall be supporting the Bill, and why I believe that the tariff system for minor injuries is absolutely necessary and must be retained in this legislation.
Alex Chalk
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood).
Whether we sit on the Government Benches or the Opposition Benches, the first thing that hon. Members have to recognise is that we do have a problem in this country; of that there can be no doubt. Other hon. Members have mentioned the statistics, but they bear repeating. In 2005-2006, there were 460,000 or so road traffic accident-related personal injury claims. Just a decade later, that number had soared by 40-odd per cent. to 650,000. There must be concern that the circumstances exist in our country to create an unnecessarily fertile ground for spurious and unfounded claims. What are those circumstances? They include the fact that instead of challenging whether a whiplash claim is dishonest or otherwise unfounded, insurers will take a commercial decision to pay out, because that will be in their interest. As other Members have indicated, the effect of that is that ordinary people living on modest incomes are finding themselves having to pay more for their car insurance than would otherwise be the case.
It is a great mistake to say, as some do, that a car is a luxury—to say, “You don’t need your car; alternative transport methods should be satisfactory.” For plenty of my constituents, that simply is not the case. We currently have a big issue in Cheltenham with the closure of Boots Corner, a key arterial route through the town. One argument made by those who favour closing off the road is that people can get around on bikes. That might be okay for some people, but for plenty of my constituents—including nurses, people ferrying around their children, and people with disabilities—it is not. We have a duty in this House, wherever we stand, to drive down the costs of living for hard-working people and their families.
We have to be clear on what the legislation is not about. A lot of the points made by Opposition Members are motivated by the best of intentions. I have served on the Justice Committee with several Opposition Members, and they have shown great distinction—if I may be so bold—and argued vigorously and passionately for the principle of access to justice and on employment tribunal fees, to which the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) referred. But that is not what this legislation is about. It is important not to set up straw men to knock down. Were this debate about LASPO, access to justice and ensuring that people could get early legal advice and assistance, I would have an awful lot more sympathy, but in fact is far more restricted, calibrated and proportionate.
First, this debate and the provisions in the Bill are not about people who sustain whiplash injuries and whose pain, suffering and loss of amenity last beyond two years. If they do last for longer than two years, the case of course falls outwith the tariff system. Secondly, this debate is not about special damages. Let us consider a run-of-the-mill case in which somebody is involved in an accident, makes a whiplash claim because they have a sore neck, spends time off work and incurs taxi fees going to and from the doctor and various other fees. Such special damages would not be subject to any kind of tariff and could be claimed in the normal way. In other words, if someone was off work for, say, nine months, the mere fact that their general damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity had been capped would not in any way preclude them from seeking the full extent of their special damages. That is why it is important to draw a distinction.
Andy Slaughter
I should say that I have secured a three-hour Westminster Hall debate on the LASPO review, access to justice and all such matters on 1 November. I look forward to having the hon. Gentleman join us and to his being fully supportive of my speech.
On this issue, the hon. Gentleman may want to address specifically the issue of the level of the tariff. I hear what he is saying, but what about the level of damages, which cannot in any way compensate for what are in many cases real injuries?
Alex Chalk
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point about LASPO, because if I may say so he is on stronger ground on that territory and I look forward to attending his debate and making some observations. That debate truly is about a cardinal principle that we in this Chamber should all share: whatever a person’s circumstances, they should be entitled to access to justice. It would be quite wrong, though, to conflate that debate with the one we are having.
On the tariffs, I do not suggest that this is the case for the hon. Gentleman, but there cannot be synthetic outrage. If someone has suffered pain, suffering and loss of amenity to the extent that their symptoms endure beyond two years, they are entitled to get whatever the judge thinks appropriate. We are dealing with claims that, although not insignificant, are towards the lower end of the spectrum. That needs to be borne in mind.
Ellie Reeves
The hon. Gentleman is right in saying that special damages are not included in the tariff. However, the point that needs to be made is that under the tariff system someone could, as he rightly points out, be off work for a very, very long time, but because of the way that the tariffs are set, their claim would fall into the small claims track, meaning that they would not be able to have their legal costs covered, so would be unlikely to get representation for their claim. That is likely to mean that they could have a big special damages claim that is never recoverable because they will be unable to afford to pursue their claim. Does he agree?
Alex Chalk
No, I do not. First, in any event, as the hon. Lady knows, if the person’s claim extends beyond £5,000, it will go on to the fast track, so they will be entitled to get that cost. Secondly, the concern that a number of solicitors raise about this is to say, “The really difficult thing that you need to claim—the thing that is hard sometimes to prove—is the general damages element.” That is why they have become so indignant about it. In fact, the special damages claim is rather easier to quantify, and I do not think that people would, in effect, be frozen out of justice. Thirdly—if this aspect of the Bill had not been changed, I think I would be opposing it—for the really difficult claims where, for example, somebody has been injured at work and faces, as I accept entirely, the added burden of having to take on their employer, the threshold does not apply in the same way. It is absolutely right that the Government have moved on that to ensure that anything above £2,000 means that people go on to the fast track.
On the hon. Lady’s specific point about the tariff, is it right to say that this is an egregious departure from anything that we have known before in English law? That is putting it far too high. My hon. Friend the Minister has already indicated that the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority sets that principle in any event. Furthermore, it is a principle adopted in plenty of other countries that are signatories to the European convention on human rights, Italy for one.
It is also worth stepping back to consider the criminal law. Before the Sentencing Guidelines Council, as it was then called, started to set its guidelines in terms of tariffs for criminal penalties, there was a concern that it would be intruding on the discretion of the courts, but in fact it has worked very well. Defendants, lawyers and judges have really welcomed the guidelines, which set clearer tariffs, because that provides a degree of clarity. Of course, it is not a direct equivalent because judges still retain some discretion within the guidelines, but it does make the point that completely open-ended discretion does not exist everywhere throughout the legal system.
There are other mitigating factors that allow me, and people like me, to conclude that these are fair and proportionate proposals. First and most important is the exceptional circumstances uplift. Clause 5(1) says:
“Regulations made by the Lord Chancellor may provide for a court—
(a) to determine that the amount of damages payable for pain, suffering and loss of amenity in respect of one or more whiplash injuries is an amount greater than the tariff amount relating to that injury”.
In other words, there is a safety net in circumstances where the law would otherwise do an injustice. That is really important and ought to give a lot of comfort to Opposition Members who might otherwise be concerned. The second reason I feel comforted is that the tariffs are clearly going to have the engagement and input of the judges. That is why Lord Brown concluded that there was nothing wrong in principle with a tariff system.
There are of course things that have to be got right. It is critically important that any savings that are derived from this are truly passed on to motorists. I want to ensure that constituents in Cheltenham receive the benefits. We need to ensure that young people who are setting out on their careers and need their car for work, for whom every last £10 is critically important, will be receiving these benefits. If they do, then my clear view is that these principles are sensible, proportionate and calibrated, and have a safety net. Even though—I probably ought to have declared this at the beginning, Madam Deputy Speaker—my wife is a personal injury lawyer, I feel confident that I can take on the domestic dispute just as I have taken on Opposition Members in this House.
Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) and to speak in the debate, to oppose amendment 2, tabled by those on the Labour Front Bench. I will add to the remarks that I made on Second Reading and in the Public Bill Committee.
This is a very important piece of legislation for the insurance industry and, more importantly, for customers of the insurance industry—our constituents up and down the country—who will benefit from it. As I found in my Westminster Hall debate on road safety last week, which I was pleased to secure, there is great interest from Members right across the House in matters relating to traffic accidents and the causes and mitigation of crashes. It is not a surprise to me that this legislation regarding appropriate compensation for certain collisions has attracted a great deal of interest and scrutiny.
Our debate in Westminster Hall attracted a range of thoughtful and personal contributions about specific cases in Members’ constituencies. That is relevant to this amendment, because many Members raised the importance of addressing this not just through legislation but, importantly, through action on the entire road network. I was pleased to see the report by the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, in association with Ageas Insurance, which looks at a systemic approach to improving road safety, so that we can reduce the number of whiplash claims and, most importantly, the number of people seriously injured or killed on our road network.
I am grateful to the Minister for the clarity that he brought to aspects of the Bill in Committee. Although I thought the Committee was dealt with very efficiently and we got through it pretty quickly, we had a great number of interesting contributions from Members across the Committee. I am sure the Minister’s remarks will be similarly informative and comprehensive today.
I want to move on to safer vehicles, particularly in relation to whiplash. One notable feature of any debate on road safety and traffic collisions is the focus on how much safer our cars, vans and lorries are today than they were only a decade ago. They are safer by design, and the advances in building motor vehicles that cause much fewer more serious injuries on impact are hugely welcome. Indeed, the number of accidents has fallen by almost a third since 2005.
As the Minister noted in Committee, the percentage of cars with safety features specifically designed to reduce whiplash has increased from only 15% in 2005 to nearly 85% now—that is to say, the position is completely reversed. Whereas only 15% of cars used to have anti-whiplash safety features, now only 15% do not have them. That is still too high a percentage, but vast progress has been made. Despite the 30% reduction in road traffic accidents, the number of whiplash claims has increased remarkably, by 40%. Something does not add up, and the Bill seeks to address concerns that certain claims are either exaggerated or unfounded, forcing up insurance premiums at an alarming rate.
I have something of an interest to declare. As I said on Second Reading, as a young driver I will be particularly advantaged by this legislation. I have been hit by higher insurance rates, which are adding significant costs for people of my generation and for our constituents right across the country. I am reassured that there has been meaningful engagement with the insurance industry by the Government throughout the process of the Bill, with both Government and industry working to get the legislation right for consumers and focusing on how we can ensure that insurance premiums do come down.
As I have said before, Ageas Insurance, which is one of the largest insurance providers in the UK, employs more than 400 people in my constituency. It has very much given me the assurance that it absolutely persists in its support for the changes proposed, which will entirely benefit its policy holders and our constituents. Those policy holders have faced massive increases in bills, but they should now at last see some respite and reductions.
The insurance industry’s support for the legislation is shared by the vast majority of the public. This is not just about the insurance industry pushing an issue; it is about the majority of the public pushing for what they believe is the right thing to do. We are fair-minded people in this country and, particularly in Stoke-on-Trent, we are not comfortable with the idea of a compensation culture. While resolutely recognising that, where there is clear medical evidence, liability must of course mean consequences for those at fault, that should not apply to those who seek to abuse the system.
What will the Bill do? It will reduce insurance premiums for hard-pressed motorists by adjusting how the personal injury discount rate is set. It is not about stopping those who genuinely deserve compensation from getting the settlement they justly deserve. It is of course a matter of justice that we have a system of rules under which everyone plays by those rules, without allowing them to play the system.
It is very welcome that the Government are introducing a new tariff specifically to target the exaggerated and fraudulent whiplash claims that have driven up insurance premiums. The creation of a new fixed compensation level for whiplash injuries is exactly the right thing to do to address the general and obvious anomaly that the number of accidents is going down but the number of claims for whiplash is going up. Equally, it is the right thing to do to ensure that there are provisions to increase compensation in exceptional circumstances. That stands in stark contrast with the current situation, where financial compensation figures are negotiated by the force of will and expertise in the opaque language or legalese of the interested parties.
I stress that these changes are not about denying genuine claims, but about discouraging speculative or exaggerated claims and claims with no just foundation. Such claims have the unjust consequence of forcing up insurance premiums to pay claims-chasing lawyers. I am glad that the Government have been so clear in attempting to get the balance right. As the Minister said in Committee, the Lord Chief Justice should be consulted on the levels of tariffs, as well as on the percentage uplift for judicial discretion. It is right that this should be done in an accountable, responsible, transparent and predictable fashion. I am sure the Lord Chancellor will be in no doubt about the feeling of this House that that should be done. He is accountable to this House, of course, and it should be reassuring to Members that his Ministry has modelled its approach to setting the tariff on that used in other countries, such as France and Italy.
It should be remembered that the bone of contention is not damages paid out for serious, long-lasting cases of whiplash but the anomalous prevalence of minor claims. The Bill addresses that by ensuring that when someone makes a claim for whiplash injuries, it is backed up by medical evidence and the damages are proportionate to the injury suffered. It will also ensure that those who have suffered life-changing injuries continue to receive 100% compensation—that is a key principle of the Bill.
Clearly the current balance is not right, with ordinary motorists being unfairly penalised through needlessly over-inflated premiums. That does not seem the best value for taxpayers’ money. Without reform, motor premiums could continue to rise by about 10% a year, which is shockingly high and unsustainable for working families and, especially, younger motorists. The Government argue that the whiplash reforms in the Bill will restore a sense of balance to the insurance and claims system, delivering about £1.1 billion of consumer savings every year. That could mean motorists’ insurance premiums falling by an average of £35 a year, with the high level of competition that is currently prevalent in the industry ensuring that it is the customers—our constituents—who benefit by far the most. This cannot and will not, of course, be a straight switch from a money grab by lawyers to a money grab by insurers.
I want to go through some of the key things that the Bill will achieve in this area. About 650,000 road traffic accident-related personal injury claims were made in 2017-18—nearly 200,000 more than in 2005-06. The Government estimate that about 85% of them were for whiplash-related injuries. Those figures remain high despite a reduction in the number of road traffic accidents reported to the police and improved vehicle safety. The continuing high number and cost of claims increases the cost of motor insurance premiums to ordinary customers and consumers, which was why, as has been said today, the 2017 manifesto included a commitment to reduce insurance costs for ordinary motorists by tackling fraudulent and exaggerated whiplash claims. That is a key commitment for the Conservative Government.
The introduction of a tariff will both simplify the process for genuinely injured whiplash claimants and ensure that they receive proportionate compensation. In addition to a tariff payment, all claimants will continue to receive special damages covering compensation for any actual financial losses suffered as a result of their accident. The new measures will reduce and control the cost of whiplash claims and disincentivise unmeritorious claims. A tariff system is consistent with other schemes, such as the criminal injuries compensation scheme, which other countries right across the world use.
Having introduced a tariff system, it is essential that we provide that the Lord Chancellor must regularly review the level of the tariff, as clause 4 provides for. However, the Government recognise that there may be exceptional circumstances in which higher levels of compensation are needed, and I very much welcome that. For that reason, clause 4 also allows a judge to determine a higher level of damages. It is right that that remains part of the Bill.
Mrs Badenoch
I rise to speak in support of the Bill and to oppose amendment 2. First, however, I will remind the House why we need the Bill; we have heard it over and over again in the debate. I know that other Members have had similar experiences of nuisance calls from ambulance-chasing companies, and many of my constituents certainly have. As of this week, I am still receiving calls from companies telling me that they had heard I had been in a car accident that was not my fault—this must have been the 10th time that I received such a call this year. Needless to say, I have not been involved in any car accident then or since.
However, this debate is not about nuisance calls, but about the incentives behind them, which are to encourage unnecessary and, in many cases, fraudulent insurance claims that are difficult, if not impossible, to prove. If we remove the incentive for claims companies to act in this way, we will get rid of the ones encouraging fraud and probably the nuisance calls as well. So many would welcome this. Because of the actions of these companies, insurance premiums for honest, safe and sensible drivers reached a record high of £493 at the end of 2017. As other Members have mentioned, young drivers in particular already pay over double the average premium.
For so many of us, motor insurance premiums are one of the highest bills we pay. The Government have repeatedly expressed that their mission is to get a country that works for everyone, and reducing costs for the “just about managing” is one way to do that. It has also been said several times in the debate that these measures, alongside the secondary legislation, will reduce the cost of motor insurance premiums on average by around £35 a year. I know that many of my constituents would appreciate much lower motor insurance premiums.
I also echo the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) about the strain on public services. At present, with a discount rate of minus 0.75%, the NHS is overpaying on claims for clinical negligence, which is adding to pressure on the public purse. In 2017-18, around £400 million in additional funds had to be provided to the NHS as a consequence of the change in the discount rate. In 2016-17, the NHS spent £1.7 billion on clinical negligence cases. The annual cost has almost doubled since 2010, with an average 13.5% increase every year. Like everyone in this House, I am looking forward to the end of austerity, and perhaps this Bill can help us to get there.
Huw Merriman
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. She brought up the discount rate and I could not resist the temptation to intervene. I absolutely welcome changes to the discount rate, but would she like to see a future in which, rather than one lump sum being paid out for compensation for the rest of someone’s life, we look more at doing this on an annual basis? That may make the overall costs more reasonable and make it less likely that investments will go wrong.
Mrs Badenoch
I thank my hon. Friend for making that very good point. This argument was made during the Justice Committee’s evidence sessions, and I am in two minds about it. There are good reasons to have both. An annual payment can help to reduce strain in the long term, but for some people, the constant payments would be a reminder of a particularly traumatic accident. Perhaps we need a flexible system that can accommodate both, depending on a claimant’s particular circumstances, but I thank him for raising that point.
I do not believe we need amendment 2. The purpose of the tariff as set out in clause 3 is to simplify the process for those who have been injured while ensuring they receive compensation that is proportionate. Not only that, but claimants will continue to receive special damages for any financial losses they suffer as a result. Similar systems are in use in countries such as Italy and Spain, which have already seen positive impacts on both the number of claims and the cost of premiums.
The Opposition are concerned that the tariff cannot be varied according to individual circumstances, but this is not the case. As my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke) has already noted, the tariff is staggered to account for the duration of the injury, whether that be between four and six months or, at the highest end of the spectrum, 19 and 24 months. Furthermore, clause 5 allows judges the discretion to make awards above the tariff level when the individual circumstances merit it. Amendment 2 seeks to remove this clause, as well as clause 4, under which the Lord Chancellor can regularly review the tariff. That would not be right.
The Government have noted that about 650,000 road traffic accident personal injury claims were made in 2017-18. An estimated 85% of those claims were for whiplash-related injuries. That is over 550,000 whiplash claims. As many Members have said, however, there has simultaneously been a reduction in the number of road traffic accidents reported to the police, while improvements continue to be made in vehicle safety. This is leading to increasing premiums for my constituents, and that cannot be right.
It seems to me, from listening to this debate, that Parliament is caught in a technical argument between the insurance lobbyists and the legal services lobbyists. I speak here on behalf on my constituents. I am keen to hear from the Minister how the Government can ensure that cost savings reach the consumer and are not negated by future policy proposals. Having said that, the Bill is an opportunity for the Government to bring down premiums and let people keep more of their own money in their pockets. That is a principled and Conservative ideal. Removing clauses 3, 4 and 5 would go against all efforts to help them and the taxpayer.
Huw Merriman
Would my hon. Friend also recognise that we have a good track record on this? A few years ago, when the Government made changes to the civil litigation procedure, an average of £50 was knocked off insurance premiums as a result.
Mrs Badenoch
I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. It is something I would have liked to say earlier, and I am glad he was able to make it for me.
In conclusion, the Bill fulfils a manifesto commitment by my party and should make it easier for genuine whiplash claimants. I will be supporting it tonight, but not, I am afraid, Opposition amendment 2.
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Mrs Badenoch). As we have heard, the Bill makes important changes to our personal injury compensation system, and although I broadly support its aims and measures, I would like to put on the record a few of my concerns and those raised with me by lawyers and constituents.
The Bill is long overdue. The last increase to the small claims limit was made in 1991. As we have heard, data from the Department for Work and Pensions reveal that about 650,000 road traffic accident-related personal injury claims were made in 2017-18 and that about 85% of these were for whiplash-related injuries—a higher rate than in any other European country. Department for Transport figures, however, show that from 2007 to 2017 reported RTAs fell by 30%.
Clause 3 introduces a tariff for compensation in whiplash claims. Lawyers who have contacted me and met to discuss this have supported the arguments made by the Access to Justice Foundation, which has estimated that the proposed new tariff would deny 600,000 people injured on our roads each year the right to legal advice when seeking compensation.
The question I have asked is: how does this value equality and fairness in comparing types of injury under the compensation regime? For instance, under the proposed tariff, if I experienced an injury in a road traffic accident that lasted up to three months—as I have in the past—I would receive £235 in compensation. Compensation varies across many sectors. If my train journey from London to Stockport, a route on which I travel every week, were delayed by two hours, I could receive up to £338. Under these proposals, the same injury would attract less compensation simply because it was sustained in a road traffic accident rather than in another way.
Rory Stewart
I am interested by my hon. Friend’s speech. She said that she would be entitled to compensation amounting to £338 for a two-hour delay. Is that compensation for the ticket that was purchased? What is the nature of the compensation?
Mary Robinson
I am talking about the compensation that would normally be paid by train operators.
It is important that we tackle whiplash fraud, but it is hard to explain to those who are injured that the same injuries sustained in different circumstances—for example, a comparable injury at work—should be compensated differently. Under the reform proposals, someone who had been involved in a road accident would be entitled to £3,910 for a whiplash injury lasting up to two years, but would be unable to recover the cost of paying a lawyer to assert their rights. Someone who suffered an identical injury at work would be entitled to £6,500, and would be able to recover costs. For many people, it goes to the heart of ensuring fairness that comparable injuries should attract comparable awards—if awards are indeed to be given—whether those injuries were sustained in a road traffic accident or incurred at a place of work.
If, as is hoped and predicted, these changes result in savings to the insurance industry, it is important for members of the public to see that the savings are passed on via reduced premiums. Concerns were raised about that in Committee, and I am encouraged that the Government accepted amendments that will hold insurers to account. As amended, the Bill places a statutory requirement on insurers to provide the Financial Conduct Authority with certain information to enable Treasury Ministers to report to Parliament on whether the insurers have upheld their public commitments by passing on savings. The Government have estimated that these measures would lead to a reduction in motor insurance premiums of approximately £40 per customer per year. I expect the industry to demonstrate that savings are being appropriately passed on, so that consumers can see fairness in the insurance system.
Craig Tracey
Is my hon. Friend aware of the support for the Bill in its current form? A survey conducted by Consumer Intelligence showed that the most important factor in a low-value personal injury claim was a simple claims process, and the least important factor was the ability to claim back their legal costs.
Mary Robinson
It is absolutely right that people support reform of the system, and I support the Government’s action in doing so. I am keen to ensure that we can secure fairness for everyone through the Bill.
According to the recent AA British insurance premium index, these reforms have already triggered a fall in premiums owing to the expectation that claim costs will fall, and only yesterday it was reported that motor premiums had fallen for the first time in years: last month they were almost 10% lower than they had been in the same month in 2017. That means that the average driver is £45 better off as a result. Consumers will be pleased with lower premiums, but they must be convinced that that is worth any detriment that they may experience should they become victims of traffic accidents.
We might not be having this debate at all were it not for fraudulent claims. I can almost guarantee that, at some point in the past year, every Member—including, perhaps, the Minister—will have been contacted by a claims management company, usually wrongly asserting that they have been involved in a car accident recently, and can lodge a claim. That seriously concerns and aggravates many people. A 2017 YouGov report shows that more than two thirds of people are in favour of a ban on cold calling for personal injury claims. Cold calling is a particular issue for the vulnerable and the elderly, who may be talked into making fake or exaggerated claims. A Justice Committee report earlier this year stated that the recent restrictions on cold calling by claims companies
“do not go far enough and that an outright ban should be introduced.”
Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)
My hon. Friend will know that I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill on nuisance calls. This Bill goes some way towards addressing the issue—there is no denying that—but does she believe that we could go further and hold the directors of companies who are responsible for cold calling directly responsible for any fines that arise from their activities?
Mary Robinson
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. That should be explored and people would welcome it because they would see that we were being positive in addressing this.
Throughout the Bill’s passage, I have met regularly in my weekly surgeries with solicitors and law firms that have been engaged in this process. They have impressed me, and impressed upon me their pursuit to help the vulnerable who are injured and to ensure that we have a justice system that works, is fair and protects people.
I thank the Minister for his continued engagement and openness with me and colleagues as the Bill has progressed through both Houses. He has been open to all my questions and I am grateful for the way he has dealt with them. I look forward to this Bill progressing. I know that there will be a spirit of openness and transparency as it does.
Rory Stewart
I again thank all Members who have participated.
Amendment 2 relates centrally to the core of this Bill, which is about the question of the setting of tariffs. We have discussed this with great verve and vigour from many different sides. The first debate that has taken place in the last hour and a half has been about the purpose of these tariffs: why we are introducing them in the first place. The reason why comes out of a perception of an anomaly. That anomaly can be seen either, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) pointed out, in terms of the fact that the number of car crashes is coming down and cars are getting safer, but at the same time the number of whiplash claims over the same period has increased dramatically; or, as my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) pointed out, in terms of national differences. There are many more whiplash claims from Britain per head of population compared with Germany or France, leading to my hon. Friend speculating on biological differences.
The second debate has been about proportionality. That argument was made by, for example, my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke). He was essentially arguing, along with the former president of the Supreme Court, Lord Brown, that there needs to be a closer relationship between the amount of compensation paid and the nature of the injury suffered. As Lord Brown said in the House of Lords:
“lesser injuries were altogether too generously compensated, certainly in comparison to the graver injuries”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 10 May 2018; Vol. 791, c. 306.]
The idea of proportional compensation for a type of injury was central to the argument of my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley South (Mike Wood) reminded us that the former Labour Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw, had serious concerns about compensation for soft tissue injury and that this form of car insurance is mandatory, putting a particular obligation on the House of Commons when it considers it. But, characteristically, the most “sensible, proportionate and calibrated” speech came from my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), who, by using those three adjectives to define the nature of the tariffs, brought us, in a huge move, from jurisprudential reflections on the nature of tariff systems to a disquisition on rural transport in Cheltenham. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) brought it down to earth with a good focus on safety in vehicles.
Robert Neill
I cannot let the Minister move on from the important and significant points of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) without observing that he emphasised the role of the Lord Chancellor in consulting with the Lord Chief Justice in the setting of the tariffs. That is an important safeguard. Can the Minister tell us a little more about how it is envisaged that that will work?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. This is a concession that we have inserted into the Bill partly due to pressure from my hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Justice Committee, and from other Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson). It means that the Lord Chancellor, when reflecting on the nature of the tariff in a judicial capacity, will consult the Lord Chief Justice. That concession in the Bill, combined with the strong emphasis on judicial discretion allowing the tariffs to be uplifted, will be central to our attempt to reconcile a tariff-based system with the tradition of English common law. Through it, we hope to address some of the concerns raised by Lord Woolf.
We have discussed the purpose of the Bill, and the way in which getting rid of the tariffs as suggested in amendment 2 would undermine the central purpose of getting a more affordable system into place. We have made a number of concessions in order to meet concerns raised by many distinguished colleagues around the House, including individuals with experience of personal injury law and those with experience as constituency MPs of the honourable and serious work done by personal injury lawyers. I shall show respect to the House and touch on some of those concessions.
In the initial proposals put forward by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the autumn of 2015, the suggestion was that there would be no general damages payable at all. That was roughly the argument made by the former Labour Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw. We have moved away from that position and accepted that general damages should be paid, but we have suggested that there should be a tariff for those damages. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) has said, we will consult the Lord Chief Justice on that tariff and there will be judicial discretion. There is a precedent on tariffs—they exist in Italy and Spain—and there is even a precedent in English common law in the criminal injuries compensation scheme.
The benefits that we believe a tariff system will deliver include a reduction in the cost of this form of transaction and, hopefully, through that, a reduction in the number of potentially exaggerated or fraudulent claims. That would have an advantage for general public policy in that people would not be encouraged to make fraudulent claims. We believe that the system will also provide certainty and predictability to claimants, especially when they are connected to an online portal that will ensure that they follow a particular sequence. They will proceed to the online portal, then, for the first time, they will be required to go to a medical practitioner specialising in whiplash claims who would give them a prognosis of, for example, six months, 12 months or 24 months. On the basis of that prognosis, through the portal, a fixed tariff would then tell them exactly how much they would be given. This should mean that in the overwhelming majority of cases there would be absolutely no requirement to proceed to court. In any cases where we did proceed to court, we would rely on the small claims process in order to settle the claim, using the tariffs to reinforce the process.
The speeches so far have not touched on Government amendment 1, which I hope all Members, including Opposition Members, will be happy to accept. Clause 5(7)(a) states that the term “tariff amount” means
“in relation to one or more whiplash injuries, the amount specified in respect of the injury by regulations under section 3(2)”.
Clause 3(2) refers to the
“amount of damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity payable in respect of the whiplash injury or injuries”.
In other words, clause 3 refers to “injury or injuries”, whereas clause 5 refers simply to “the injury”. The proposal in Government amendment 1, recommended by parliamentary counsel, is that we deal with the discrepancy by inserting “or injuries” after “the injury” in clause 5(7)(a). I hope that the Opposition will be happy to accept that suggestion.
That brings us back to the central issue of the way in which tariffs are set. The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) focused a great deal on the notion that the tariffs were somehow inequitable in terms of the damage that individuals have suffered. The hon. Member for High Peak (Ruth George) said several times that we should not refer to these types of injuries as minor. I want to emphasise that the phrase “minor injuries” is derived from Judicial College guidelines, not from the Government or any political party. It is simply a long-standing convention to refer to injuries of under two years’ duration as minor injuries, and that relates to Sentencing Council guidelines for injuries of under two years’ duration.[Official Report, 3 December 2018, Vol. 650, c. 6MC.]
As hon. Members have pointed out, people who suffer, particularly from whiplash injuries of longer duration, might also lose earnings, have considerable medical costs, have to go to a physiotherapist and so on. Although those arguments were well made, for example by the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) on Second Reading, they overlook the central fact that the tariffs will apply only to general damages. An individual who has suffered loss of earnings or who needs extra care costs can apply for special damages in the normal way. The Government propose no change to special damages.
On the arguments of the hon. Member for Hammersmith about the levels of the tariffs, we have attempted to achieve a reduction in the tariff at the lower end. For example, an individual who suffers an injury of under three months’ duration could receive damages considerably less than those in the current guidelines, but I hope that the hon. Gentleman accepts that, as we approach a duration of two years, the compensation offered begins to merge much more closely with the existing guidelines at a level of £3,600.[Official Report, 3 December 2018, Vol. 650, c. 6MC.]
In addition, as the Chairman of the Justice Committee pointed out, the levels of the tariffs are currently proposals about which the Lord Chancellor will consult the Lord Chief Justice. He will do that not just once but regularly, on a three-yearly basis, to ensure that our calculations on pain, suffering and loss of amenity reflect judges’ views.
It must be remembered that, ultimately, judgments on pain, suffering and loss of amenity are difficult. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) pointed out, the question of how much compensation somebody receives for a loss of earnings is relatively easy to calculate, because the figure can be derived from the earnings. The amount of money to which someone is entitled for medical costs is, of course, directly derived from the cost of medical care provided. However, in the case of general damages, a judge must attempt to decide the subjective impact of pain on the individual and assign a financial cost to it. That cannot be anything other than a subjective judgment. There is no objective scientific formula for comparing pain with cash, because the cash is designed not to eliminate that pain, but in some way to acknowledge it. Whether we are talking about the criminal injuries compensation scheme, under which our constituents frequently come forward with examples of what they rightly and subjectively experience as a huge discrepancy between the depth of horror they have suffered at the hands of criminals and the amount of compensation offered, or the tariffs for pain, suffering and loss of amenity under the Bill, in the end the compensation provided cannot constitute anything other than a symbolic judgment, with the court or the Government acknowledging that no amount of money can remove the pain, but with the amount designed to be a public recognition that that pain exists.
The former Justice of the Supreme Court, Lord Brown, is an important guide, and his statements in the House of Lords give us all a sense of reassurance on a tricky bit of law. He feels that two important principles are at stake. The first is that there is a moral hazard and societal issue taking place, in that both the incidence of car crashes and, on a national comparison with Germany and France, the disproportionate number of whiplash claims compared with what would be expected both in terms of automobile design and the biology of the human body, need to be addressed—in other words, fraud needs to be addressed. The second is that there has been an anomaly in law whereby some of the graver injustices, and graver injuries and suffering, have been proportionally undercompensated compared with cases of suffering minor whiplash injuries—the majority of cases before the courts—which involve a duration of only three or six months.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I ask the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the No Lobby.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I will now suspend the House for no more than five minutes in order to make a decision about certification. The Division bells will be rung two minutes before the House resumes. Following certification, the Government will table the appropriate consent motions, copies of which will be made available in the Vote Office and distributed by the Doorkeepers.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I can now inform the House that I have completed certification of the Bill, as required by the Standing Order. I have confirmed the view expressed in the Speaker’s provisional certificate issued yesterday. Copies of the final certificate will be made available in the Vote Office and on the parliamentary website. Under Standing Order No. 83M, a consent motion is therefore required for the Bill to proceed. Copies of the motion are available in the Vote Office and on the parliamentary website, and have been made available to Members in the Chamber. Does the Minister intend to move the consent motion?
Rory Stewart
indicated assent.
The House forthwith resolved itself into the Legislative Grand Committee (England and Wales) (Standing Order No. 83M).
[Sir Lindsay Hoyle in the Chair]
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
I remind hon. Members that, if there is a Division, only Members representing constituencies in England and Wales may vote.
Motion made, and Question proposed,
That the Committee consents to the Civil Liability Bill [Lords].—(Rory Stewart.)
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Lindsay, especially when we are in such privileged surroundings as the de facto English Parliament. As you know, I always think that it is important that we mark and commemorate these auspicious occasions when English Members of Parliament get the opportunity to express their true English political values and to get to their feet, en masse, to discuss and debate these critical English-only issues. I also like to make a contribution in these events, as you know, Sir Lindsay. I have the proud record of having taken every single opportunity to speak when the English Parliament has met. In fact I have got the record—I have taken up something like 80% of the time in the English Parliament.
What surprises me is that when this opportunity is available to English Members, they cannot seem to bring themselves to actually consider and debate these critically important issues. There are important issues in this Bill that are English-only. In fact, the whole Bill is English-only, which rather prompts the question of why on earth we are doing this. I know that the Serjeant at Arms needs a bit of exercise, and it is quite an onerous responsibility to take the Mace down and then put it back up. We obviously need an opportunity to see if the Division bells are still working, so the bells will go on and off, but then nothing ever happens. What is the point of this ludicrous session that we go through every time that a Bill has been certified in this way?
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to ask what is the point because under the Government’s position, this English Parliament passes a legislative consent motion, but the experience of the Scottish Parliament is that legislative consent motions are worthless, and that the Government do not need legislative consent motions from the constituent parts of the United Kingdom to pass their legislation.
Pete Wishart
My hon. Friend makes a good and valid point, because legislative consent does seem to mean different things in different Parliaments. Here, for example, we have the Legislative Grand Committee: an innovation of this Parliament to allow English Members the opportunity to put forward their own particular English-only issues and amendments. In Scotland, of course, we have legislative consent motions that require our Scottish Parliament to agree, on its own behalf, to legislation passed in this House. There seems to be a particular problem with this. We have our own Parliament that is responsible for legislative consent motions, which are now more or less ignored by this Parliament. Here we have the English Legislative Grand Committee squatting in the UK Parliament. This is the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but somehow it still operates as a de facto English Parliament and as the venue for this Legislative Grand Committee.
It strikes me that that might be a bit odd. I have a little solution that I have presented to this House before, thus far without any great success and without anybody really paying attention to what was suggested, so I will make one more attempt: how about English Members getting their own Parliament? Then there will be a Scottish Parliament, a Welsh Assembly, a Northern Ireland Assembly and an English Parliament. Then, instead of having all these Legislative Grand Committees, we can all come together in a United Kingdom Parliament that is responsible for particular, defined issues, instead of having this ridiculous notion where English colleagues seem almost to squat in this place in order attend a debate that nobody takes part in.
Pete Wishart
I give way to the Minister first, because I am particularly interested in his views about this.
Rory Stewart
I would be grateful to know how Union issues of foreign affairs and defence, which the people of Scotland voted in a referendum should continue to be dealt with by the United Kingdom, would be covered by the hon. Gentleman’s proposal.
Pete Wishart
I only have a few seconds left. I am surprised at the Minister, because he is an erudite chap who understands constitutional issues and the history of this nation. Quite succinctly, I will tell him what it is called. It is called federalism, which is where there are constituent Assemblies that have equal power and authority, and there is then another stratum of government, which would be the UK Parliament—
The Chairman
Order. You did better than normal, Mr Wishart.
Debate interrupted (Programme Order, 4 September).
The Chair put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair (Standing Order No. 83M(5)),
That the Committee consents to the Civil Liability Bill [Lords].
Question agreed to.
The occupant of the Chair left the Chair to report the decision of the Committee (Standing Order No. 83M(6)).
The Deputy Speaker resumed the Chair; decision reported.
Third Reading
Rory Stewart
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak on Third Reading. This Bill has been a long time coming. The first suggestions of the Bill’s introduction date back to 2012, six years ago, and the precise measures in the Bill were proposed by the Chancellor in an autumn statement in 2015, more than three years ago. Since then, there has been a series of detailed consultations. I would like to pay tribute to the Justice Committee for its prelegislative scrutiny, particularly on the issue of discount rates. Perhaps the biggest tribute must be paid to all Members of the other House, who undertook a very serious series of debates, which led to a number of significant changes to the Bill that I hope all Members of the House agree are significant improvements.
Perhaps the most dramatic improvement is the Government amendment that ensures insurers pass on savings to their customers. A number of learned, hon. and right hon. Friends have expressed concerns that were we to achieve a situation in which the insurance companies paid out less to claimants, that would simply go into the insurance companies’ bottom line. We have therefore introduced through an amendment perhaps the most detailed and unprecedented reporting requirements incumbent on the insurance companies to the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority.
Rory Stewart
I will give way in one moment. To clarify, the intention is that the companies not just may but will pass this information to the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority, and the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority not just may but will request that information, so that we can accurately explain to Parliament and the people how much money the insurance companies are making from their premiums, how much they are paying out to claimants, how much savings they are making and how much of those savings they are passing on to their customers.
Julian Knight
Will the Minister confirm that this is an unprecedented level of oversight, in terms of what the Government are challenging the insurance industry to perform for its customers?
Rory Stewart
Absolutely. It is an unprecedented move. The fundamental idea is that the insurance companies are operating in a competitive market, so this is not simply a question of how much money they take in premiums or how much money they pay out; it is also about attracting customers, and in order to attract customers, they need to compete with one another on price. If they were not to do so, they would in effect be running a cartel, and the information they give to the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority would provide exactly the evidence to display that kind of unfair practice. We are therefore guaranteeing that the commitment made by 85% of the insurance industry to pass on these savings to customers will be upheld. I give way to the hon. Member for Belfast South (Emma Little Pengelly). [Interruption.] Oh, no, she was not intervening on me. I apologise.
Simon Hoare
I must say that I have been confused with many things, but to be confused with an hon. Lady from the DUP is a first.
My hon. Friend the Minister, perfectly properly and quite rightly, is placing very important obligations on the insurance industry. The FCA has a raft of things of which it has oversight. How is he proposing, alongside the Treasury, to communicate to the FCA that this House has the legitimate expectation that the FCA should be robust in seeking that information from the insurers?
Rory Stewart
This is a very good challenge, and we will reinforce that duty on the FCA through both the legislation and the statements within the amendment proposed by the Government. We will also reinforce it through this statement from the Dispatch Box: we will require the insurers to pass this information on and we will require the Treasury and the FCA to request it. The purpose of requesting that information is rigorously to hold the insurance industry to account and ensure that the savings are passed on to customers.
I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the personal injury lawyers. One of the problems in this debate has been the suggestion that it is a black-and-white, sometimes Manichean dispute, with the press and civil society sometimes unfairly implying that the personal injury lawyers are somehow to blame. We must put on the record very clearly our respect for the personal injury lawyers and the work they do.
In addition, we must send a very strong message of respect towards people who are genuine victims of whiplash injuries, or indeed of any other form of personal injury. They are entitled to a fair level of compensation and to an adequate level of representation. We believe very strongly that the measures in the Bill strike a proportionate and reasonable balance between fair compensation, reasonable representation and the costs imposed on the rest of society.
Kevin Hollinrake
My hon. Friend makes a very good point about the personal injury lawyers. One of the provisions in the Bill—I think it is clause 8—states that claims management companies will be regulated by the FCA. We already regulate the insurance industry, so how do we make sure there is no conflict of interest in the regulation of both those parties, which often have competing interests?
Rory Stewart
This is a very interesting point, and I am very happy to follow up on it in more detail. The nature of the regulation in each case is quite distinct. In relation to the insurance industry, the regulation proposed is to ensure that we have the financial information to prove that the savings the insurance industry has derived from these reforms are passed on to customers. In the case of the claims management companies, the regulation is to ensure that they comply with the law, particularly the legal changes introduced by previous legislation. In accordance with the suggestions from the Justice Committee, we are also looking at the advice forthcoming from the judiciary to ensure that we can deal with other issues involving claims management companies.
If I may, I will come back to the core of the Bill. We are dealing with a perfect storm of three things. First, at the minor end of whiplash injuries—the three-to-six-month end—this is a condition that, in effect, is unverifiable and difficult to disprove. The polite way of expressing this is to say that there is an asymmetry of information. Somebody suffering a whiplash injury will experience genuine and sincere pain, but that pain cannot be detected at the minor end through any medical instruments. That is the first challenge involved in this type of injury.
The second challenge is of course the level of payments offered to individuals suffering these injuries. The third is the level of recoverable costs which meant, in effect, that a no win, no fee process was operating in which people could apply to a lawyer to represent them and be confident that the legal costs would be recoverable from the defendant. When that is connected to the fact that for all the reasons I have given—particularly the first, asymmetry of information—the insurance companies are not contesting claims, we end up with a discrepancy rapidly emerging between the number of motor vehicle accidents and the number of claims, and between the number of claims made in the United Kingdom and the number made in other jurisdictions.
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, a former justice of the Supreme Court, stated that he was
“reluctantly persuaded that this provision is justified: it is surely intolerable that we are known as the whiplash capital of the world, so I have concluded that it is open to government, as a matter of policy, to seek to deter dishonest claims in this way.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1603.]
Kwasi Kwarteng
Does my hon. Friend have any idea why the situation has developed in which we are the whiplash capital of the world, as the noble Lord put it?
Rory Stewart
It is a sensitive issue, because of course many individuals who have even quite a minor road accident experience a whiplash injury and have significant pain, particularly in the soft tissue of the neck and shoulders, which can last three to six months in the majority of cases or longer in a minority of cases. However, the New England Journal of Medicine, which conducted a significant study across various countries, concluded that the prognosis for a whiplash injury was significantly worse in countries in which compensation existed. In other words, there appears to be some form of medical relationship between the compensation offered and the prognosis for the whiplash injury.
How that relationship operates is a matter of speculation, but the following things may explain it. First, compensation payments and the encouragement provided by claims management companies, particularly on the telephone—we have heard a great deal of anecdotal evidence about that today—could encourage individuals to make claims that they may not themselves feel are as justified as the claims management companies imply. That leads to serious problems, the first of which is moral. It is a problem of dishonesty. In effect, it appears that some people—we do not know how many, but certainly a significant minority—are being encouraged to make dishonest insurance claims. As hon. Members have pointed out, that is potentially morally corrosive to our society. We do not want to encourage a system in which people feel that they can make such claims.
The second problem is that the situation has had a disproportionate impact on court time. Lord Faulks has said:
“If there was to be a reduction for really serious injuries, I can imagine why noble Lords would baulk at the imposition of a tariff. However, we are for the most part talking about pain and discomfort of a relatively transient nature…So these reforms—quite modest though they are—are a proper response to what I would describe as a racket.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1607.]
The cost to society imposed by this compensation is disproportionate to the severity of injury.
Eddie Hughes
This might sound like an unrelated point, but surely the best way to deal with whiplash is to prevent it from happening in the first place. I believe that in 2015, the Government committed to spending £1.5 billion on 10 smart motorway schemes, the idea of which is to keep traffic flowing at a constant speed. If people are stopping and starting all the time, they lose concentration and are more likely to drive into the car in front of them, resulting in a possible claim for whiplash. The Government are dealing not just with the problem itself but with the root cause.
Rory Stewart
That is a very good point. Fundamentally, our prime obligation must be to improve road safety. Both the Labour Government and our own Government have made progress in that regard. In fact, over the past 15 years we have seen a 35% reduction in road traffic accidents, and, as we have heard, the safety equipment in vehicles has improved dramatically. Whereas 15 years ago only 15% of vehicles were fitted with equipment that can protect someone from whiplash, 85% now are, so people are safer in their car and less likely to have an accident. However, my hon. Friend’s central point is absolutely right. Very tragically—I have experience of this through my constituents, as will other hon. and right hon. Members—if someone who was killed in a motor car did not have a dependant, their family would be entitled to almost no compensation at all. Our obligation must be to prevent the accident from happening in the first place.
John Howell
Earlier this afternoon, the Minister will have heard my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) give an example of how he was approached—hassled, in fact—by a claims management company. I, too, have been in that situation for a fictitious accident and I still get calls about that. Is dealing with this not one of the real ways that we will be able to prevent our being the whiplash capital?
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend makes a very good point, which has been made by the shadow Front-Bench team and others: dealing with claims management companies is going to be a central part of this. Consultation has taken place on this, and measures have been taken against claims management companies. A significant issue remains, which we are consulting on and trying to resolve—to be honest with the House, it is the fact that many of these calls come from foreign jurisdictions, so the challenge is trying to work out the best way to deal with that.[Official Report, 3 December 2018, Vol. 650, c. 7MC.] On my way into the Second Reading debate, I received exactly that kind of call, encouraging me to make a whiplash claim for a car accident that I had suffered. For a moment, I wondered whether somebody had not put somebody else up to calling me in this fashion and whether this was not some kind of fuss. Sure enough, however, this is continuing to happen.
Julian Knight
Perhaps the company in question knew that the Minister was in for a bruising time in that debate. The absolute key to this whole debate is that this is about confidence in our legal system and in justice in compensation. The reality is that these phone calls and companies, which try to encourage people to make claims for any particular reason, are destroying confidence in that system. That is why the Bill is so necessary.
Rory Stewart
This is a really important point. At the core of our legal system there needs to be public trust and confidence in that system, and having an honest, proportionate, credible and calibrated system is absolutely central to the public continuing to have confidence.
With your permission, Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to make one slightly technical point relating to the Bill, and in particular to the injuries mentioned in clause 1(2) and (3). Subsection (2) states:
“An injury falls within this subsection if it is—
(a) a sprain, strain, tear, rupture or lesser damage of a muscle, tendon or ligament in the neck, back or shoulder, or
(b) an injury of soft tissue associated with a muscle, tendon or ligament in the neck, back or shoulder.”
Subsection (3) states:
“An injury is excepted by this subsection if—
(a) it is an injury of soft tissue which is a part of or connected to another injury”.
I wish to pause on that point for a second, because we wish to make it clear, as the Government, that when we refer to the question of something being “connected”, we are not referring to it being connected simply by virtue of it taking place within the same accident.
I have the following on a formal piece of paper here, so that I can make my Pepper v. Hart statement to make sure that this is clear for the judiciary. In subsection (3), therefore, we have excluded those soft tissue injuries in the neck, back or shoulder which are part of or connected to another injury, so long as the other injury is not covered by subsection (2). The effect of subsection (3) would be to exclude, for example, damage to soft tissue which results only from the fracture of an adjoining bone or the tearing of muscles arising from a penetrating injury, which would otherwise fall within subsection (2). It has been suggested that the words “connected to another injury” in subsection (3)(a) could mean an injury resulting from the same accident. There is therefore a concern that a number of soft tissue injuries that would otherwise fall under the definition of whiplash injury will be excluded, and so not subject to the tariff of damages, simply by reason of being suffered on the same occasion as a whiplash injury.[Official Report, 3 December 2018, Vol. 650, c. 8MC.]
This is absolutely not the intention behind subsection (3). Nor is it an interpretation that stands scrutiny. The effect of that interpretation would be to significantly limit the scope of clause 1, in a quite arbitrary way, based on whether a person happened to have incurred any other injury in the same road traffic accident. That is not the intended effect, and nor do we believe that the clause will be interpreted by the courts in this way, as it would not be the normal meaning of the word “connected” in this context. To clarify then: the words “connected to” do not, and are not intended to, extend to situations where two or more injuries are connected solely by their cause—for example, a road traffic accident.
Stephen Kerr
Since the Minister was taking interventions, I thought I would chance my arm and intervene to ask, as a Scottish Member, what discussions he has had with his Scottish counterpart. The Scottish Government committed to introducing draft legislation mirroring this Bill, which is for England and Wales only. Where is that Bill? I understand that it has not even begun to make progress in the Scottish Parliament. What has the conversation been like with the Scottish Minister?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. That is not the issue before us.
Rory Stewart
Unfortunately, tempted though I am to respond, as you point out, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am not entitled, particularly following some of the comic interventions from the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), to speculate on what the Scottish Government think they are doing. My hon. Friend is absolutely correct, however, that they chose to withdraw from this Bill.
We have talked a great deal about whiplash injuries and how we have attempted to address them, and I am happy for others to return to that question in interventions if they wish to do so, but we have perhaps had less time to address another central issue, which is the second part of the Bill, on the discount rate.
Robert Neill
I am pleased the Minister is mentioning that, because although we have concentrated on some controversial areas, putting the discount rate on a more modern footing is important and largely welcome, as is of course the prohibition on settlement without medical reports, which again has not been touched on but is very significant and an advance.
I want to use this opportunity to thank the Minister for what he said about the Justice Committee and the way he engaged with us and me personally. We have raised caveats with some of the objectives, and he has met us on a number of issues, if not all of them, which has enabled those of us who want to keep an eye on this and hold the Government and the industry’s feet to the fire to adopt Lord Brown of, um, Eaton, um—
Robert Neill
That one. I ought to know him, as a fellow bencher of Middle Temple, and to get his title right. The noble Lord Brown has said that with some reluctance—because it is a balancing act—he can accept the Government’s intentions in this regard. The way the Minister has handled this difficult balancing act in the Bill has made it much easier for a number of hon. Members to do the same.
Rory Stewart
I am tempted to reflect on the question from my hon. Friend the Chair of the Justice Committee. There is a central issue and challenge at the heart of the Bill. Dealing with this perfect storm of problems—unprovable conditions, high payments, recoverable costs and the actions of the insurance industry—is not easily done through primary legislation, so I pay tribute to right hon. and hon. Members on both sides for their focus on not just the primary legislation but elements of secondary legislation and some of the requirements around it.
The only way this reform will work—the only way to prevent excessive whiplash claims—is by being very nimble in anticipating exactly how claims management companies will operate and predicting how this phenomenon could change in the future. As my hon. Friend has pointed out, that means putting in place an absolute insistence that someone must have a medical examination. At the moment, many of these claims are settled without anybody having any medical examination at all. There must be a medical examination, and it must be conducted by a qualified GP, who is currently allocated through the portal in a random fashion so that people are not in a position to be able to conspire in any way as a result of the kind of doctor whom they are given. An approved GP with the right kind of training, or a medical specialist of another sort, will then give a prognosis that will allow them to proceed in a much more straightforward way.
That brings us to the second aspect, which, again, is not primarily a question of primary legislation. I refer to the design of the online portal. It is important to ensure that, as cases move to the small claims court, people have a straightforward, intuitive way of logging claims. One of the things that we will be doing over the next year is testing and retesting the portal in as many ways as we can to ensure that it actually works.
John Howell
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again. He is being most generous.
I have been a great champion of the online work that is being done in the judiciary. I have spoken to Lord Briggs, and in my time in the courts, sitting with judges, I have championed it there. Does my hon. Friend agree that a very important element of the online system is the dramatic improvement in access to justice for people who are making claims? I know that a great deal of testing is involved, but does he also agree that the delay in its introduction is regrettable because it deprives people of that access to justice?
Rory Stewart
My hon. Friend has made a good point, but there is, of course, a delicate balance to be achieved. It is absolutely true that really good online systems can transform people’s lives and make access to justice much easier for them, but, equally, the Government do not always have an unblemished record when it comes to the delivery of IT systems. It is important to ensure that the system really works and that we have tested it again and again before rolling it out, because otherwise a system designed to increase access to justice may inadvertently decrease that access through the malfunctioning of the online portal.
Robert Neill
I am very grateful for my hon. Friend’s generosity.
Some of the powerful evidence given to the Justice Committee came from two members of the judiciary who spoke about the potential unintended consequences and adverse impacts on the courts of the inability of an increasing number of litigants in person to work their way through the portal. Will my hon. Friend undertake to ensure that throughout the ongoing work on its design, the issues raised by members of the judiciary will remain central to the discussions, and that they will have a full role in the testing and roll-out?
Rory Stewart
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.
Julian Knight
Is it not the case that the mechanics of the discount rate as it was constituted by the Lord Chancellor before the previous one effectively mean that claimants are estimated to be receiving substantially more than 100% entitlement, and that is not what the system is about? We need a system that reflects current investment strategies and current investment returns.
Rory Stewart
This is a serious issue. The intention of the award made by the court is to provide 100% compensation. In other words, the intent of the court is to make sure that catastrophically injured victims receive the sum of money required to cover their lifetime care costs or loss of earnings. The best way of doing this is through a periodic payment order, which is why we have asked the Master of the Rolls and his committee to look at the use of PPOs. Under such orders, the real costs of people’s care year on year to the moment of their death will be covered; that is how the PPO operates. There is no need to give people a lump sum and speculate somehow on how long they are going to live.
In all cases we would encourage people to make much more use of PPOs. It is true that victims often do not want to accept PPOs. They would rather accept a lump sum either because they believe they can invest it and potentially generate more money or because they feel that were they to die prematurely they could pass on that lump sum to their relatives, but that is not the intention of the award. The award is designed to produce 100% compensation for their care costs.
Mary Robinson
We must get this right for people who have had those catastrophic injuries; their lives are changed forever. Getting this discount rate right is also important because it will affect how they will invest. What more can we do to ensure that they are not forced into, or tempted to, make riskier investments over the course of their lifetime, which will affect their care?
Rory Stewart
That is absolutely right. First, we must bear it in mind that when looking at compensation for somebody in terms of their lifetime care costs, there are a number of uncertainties. First, the court has to make a judgment as to how long they believe that catastrophically injured victim will live, which is very difficult. Secondly, they have to make some kind of judgment of the future performance of the financial markets in order to work out what a reasonable rate of return would be to cover those lifetime care costs. For that reason, the PPO is a much more reliable mechanism. However, in relation to the question of the risks taken by the individual, we have made it clear both in the Bill and subsequent statements what we intend in the decision of the Lord Chancellor. This will be a decision of the Lord Chancellor acting in a quasi-judicial role; this is not the Lord Chancellor acting on behalf of the Treasury, which is why the Lord Chancellor before the previous one ended up at a minus 0.75% rate, which would not have been the preferred Treasury rate. The Lord Chancellor is to make that decision on the basis that the individual concerned is a low-risk investor, and we would expect that individual to be taking less risk than would be taken by a traditional widows and orphans fund. In other words, because of the vulnerability of the investor and the importance of the return in covering things such as their lifetime care costs, we would be conservative in setting this rate.
We are confident that the rate that would be set would be better than the current rate, which imagines simply a gilt return, which does not reflect the actual nature of investing or of returns.
We are also clear that we are aiming for 100% compensation. We are not chasing a median compensation in which 50% would be under-compensated and 50% over-compensated. In fact, the Lord Chancellor would retain the discretion, on the advice of the expert committee and the Government Actuary’s Department, to be able to vary that rate. The judiciary would have the possibility of varying the rate in exceptional circumstances. Let us be in no doubt that we have an obligation to the public purse, to the NHS and to the public as a whole to control the costs. We have a moral responsibility to ensure that the compensation paid is 100% and not 125%, but we also have a moral obligation to ensure that vulnerable individuals who have suffered catastrophic injuries are properly compensated.
The Bill contains measures to reform whiplash claims and the discount rate, and it is the result of an admirable exercise in serious discussion in the upper House, in Committee, with the Justice Committee and through engagement with civil society since 2012. It contains a pragmatic, nuanced and calibrated set of measures that will deal with the excessive costs of whiplash and ensure that the discount rate is set in a way that balances the needs of our most vulnerable victims with the needs of the public purse. On the basis of that, and with great thanks to right hon. and hon. Members, I commend the Bill to the House.
Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)
It is regrettable that we are here for the Third Reading of yet another Conservative Bill that unleashes a Tory attack on the rights of victims and undermines access to justice. When the record of this Conservative Government is written—probably sooner rather than later, if the media reports are to be believed—the way in which they have entrenched a two-tier justice system will be writ large on the political epitaph of the Prime Minister and this Government. The cruelty of the Conservatives’ cuts to legal aid will be one example of that. Their wilful policy of making it harder for people to take on dodgy landlords or to challenge a flawed benefits decision or cruel immigration decision will be another, at a time when people need that kind of support more than ever. The Conservatives’ record on employment tribunal fees will also be something that we in this country will look back on shame. It is not only unlawful, as the Supreme Court decided, but immoral.
Richard Burgon
I will not.
The Government’s intent was clear for all to see. They are making it harder for workers to take on unscrupulous bosses—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) wishes to speak for the insurance industry, he can do so. Step up!
Kevin Hollinrake
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I was not going to speak for the insurance companies. I was going to ask whether he welcomed the fact that the Bill will lower the price of insurance for consumers. Does he not welcome that?
Richard Burgon
There is absolutely no guarantee of that happening as a result of the Bill. That is not its real purpose. It actually undermines access to justice. As I said on Second Reading, this is yet another attack by the Government on our justice system and on the vulnerable. It is an attack that will, in practice, enrich the Conservatives’ friends in the insurance industry—[Interruption.] As we can hear, Conservative Members do not like that allegation, and they did not like it when I made it on Second Reading. Maybe it touches a nerve. The Government had a chance to disprove it by their actions, by backing amendments that would have ensured that the Bill would not simply line the pockets of the insurers, but they did not do that.
In their media briefing, the Government claim that the Bill is about cutting the number of fraudulent whiplash claims. Of course, no one would disagree with doing that, and had the Government taken measures that did that in reality and simply stopped there, they would undoubtedly have built a broad consensus and the Bill would have been uncontentious. They did not do that, however. Instead, they pressed on with measures that will penalise the many. That, alongside their dire record on access to justice, is why we still believe that these reforms are a smokescreen. I know that there are many Conservative Members who pride themselves on defending our justice system, on upholding the rule of law and on promoting access to justice. Today is the day for those Members to show that they put their commitment to those important principles above narrow party interest by rejecting the unjust proposals.
The Bill started in the Lords, where it faced substantial opposition, not only from Labour Members or Members representing other political parties, but pre-eminent legal experts, including former Lord Chief Justices, who expressed their concerns about the Bill’s impact on access to justice and the independence of the judiciary. The Government only narrowly defeated amendments—similar to those we have discussed today—that would have fundamentally altered the Bill for the better. Since then, they have not taken the opportunity to listen, not even to those pre-eminent legal experts. They have not tried to negotiate or to remove the barriers to justice that define the Bill. For those reasons and others that I will set out, Labour Members will vote against it.
Before addressing the Bill’s provisions, I wish to place on record other elements of the package of reforms that are intended to be passed through statutory instruments. Through that route, the Government want to increase the small claims limit from £1,000 to £2,000 in all cases and from £1,000 to £5,000 in road traffic accident cases. That will make it much harder for workers to get compensation for workplace injuries, and for genuinely injured people to get a fair settlement. A significantly greater number of claims will be dealt with through the small claims procedure, whereby no legal costs are usually awarded, even in successful claims.
When legal fees are not covered, tens of thousands of working people will simply be priced out of obtaining legal assistance, resulting in many pulling, dropping or not pursuing their cases. Of course, others, determined to secure justice, will fight on, but by representing themselves, at a massive disadvantage. An insurance company will be served by a legal expert fighting their case. The victim will be left to try to navigate a complicated legal procedure, placing greater pressure on our already overstrained courts. Some will choose to pay their legal fees out of their compensation, but then, in practice, they will be compensated less than a court found appropriate. As always, the wealthy will be able to afford the best legal advice and the rest will have to suffer.
Justice for the many, not the few is mere rhetoric for the Government. In reality, it is justice for the few, not the many. Is that why the Government are trying to sneak measures through the back door rather than putting them in the Bill so that they could be debated and amended? That is a cowardly attack on workers’ rights, pushed through without real debate or scrutiny. That just about sums the Government up.
I want to give some real-life examples of people affected by the reforms because far too often their voices are not heard in this place.
Mr Speaker
Order. I gently say to the shadow Secretary of State, who has come on later than he might have expected to speak—the Minister was within his rights to speak for an unusually long time for Third Reading—that the hon. Member for Belfast South (Emma Little Pengelly) indicated to me several hours ago that she wished to contribute on Third Reading. It would be most unfortunate if there were not an opportunity for Back-Bench Members to speak. I am not blaming the hon. Gentleman, but I ask him whether he might take account of the interest on both sides of the House.
Richard Burgon
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.
Those people include a driver, working to take disabled people to and from a day centre, who, because he had not been properly trained, fell off the vehicle while assisting a wheelchair user and suffered a back injury. They include a cleaner in a hospital who, while mopping the floor, went to pick up some papers and pricked her finger on an unsafely discarded needle. She suffered a psychological and physical injury. Just imagine the fear she must have felt as she waited for the test results. Those are examples of cases that have been sent to my office, and of real people who would be penalised by the new system. Those are the people whose voices the Government are content to drown out with their rhetoric that labels people fraudsters and says that they are on the make when they are anything but.
When we consider the Bill, we should not forget that there was a 90% drop-off in employment tribunal claims when employments tribunal fees came into effect. Something similar could happen again with personal injury cases, with genuine victims priced out of justice and deterred from pursuing a claim for an injury that was not their fault.
It is not only Labour who oppose this Conservative attack on access to justice. The Justice Committee has explained that
“increasing the small claims limit for personal injury creates significant access to justice concerns.”
We agree with the Justice Committee and the recommendation of the Lord Justice Jackson review that the small claims limit should be increased in line with inflation, which would mean a rise to £1,500, not the £2,000 currently proposed. We have repeatedly tabled amendments to the Bill, and it is a shame that the Government have not listened. We have also made clear our position on tariffs, and it is a shame that the Government have not responded in a meaningful way to those amendments.
I am conscious that Mr Speaker has asked that I shortly draw my remarks to a conclusion, but I urge every Member of this House to look at the chart produced by the House of Commons Library at page 30 of the briefing and ask themselves whether this is just. What does the chart show? It shows that compensation for an injury lasting up to six months will fall to a fixed £470, down from the current average of £2,150—down by three quarters. Compensation for an injury lasting 10 to 12 months will be £1,250, down from the current average of £3,100—down 60%. Compensation for an injury lasting 16 to 18 months will be £2,790, down from £3,950—down by 30%. Is that what the Conservatives mean by justice?
Injured people who have done nothing wrong are losing out and being placed at a huge disadvantage. If Conservative Members do not want to take Labour’s word for it, they should at least think very carefully about what was said in the House of Lords. The point has already been made that this Bill undermines the independence of the judiciary with the tariff system. We have commented on the definition of whiplash and on the fact that the Government are making out that fraud is taking place on an industrial scale. Do something about cold calling from claims management companies; do not target injured people.
Why not exempt children? People outside this place will not believe that the Government did not concede on our common-sense amendment and have refused to budge on the discount rate.
The central purpose of the Bill is to tip the scales of justice against injured people and in favour of insurance companies’ profits. The Conservatives have shown that this is about lining the pockets of insurance companies by refusing to vote for Labour’s considered amendments, which would have protected vulnerable people and safeguarded fair treatment for victims. This attack on justice is not the first by this Government since 2010—after legal aid and employment tribunal fees—and I fear it will not be the last Tory attack on access to justice.
The wider measures that the Conservatives plan to introduce alongside the Bill will leave tens of thousands of people unable to enforce their legal rights. The Bill may well turn out to be the thin end of the wedge for yet more restrictions on justice in all personal injury cases. If it passes, it will be celebrated as a great victory by the insurance companies in whose interests it has been conceived and drafted, and it will be ordinary people, whose rights are gradually chipped away, who pay the price. That is why Labour will be voting against Third Reading tonight.
Eddie Hughes
It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon), although I was slightly concerned that, as he reached his peroration, a sudden stop in his speaking might have caused some whiplash to himself, but he seems to have escaped from the Dispatch Box unaffected.
The Joseph Malins poem “The Ambulance down in the Valley” tells the story of a village on a cliff edge and, instead of putting up a fence around the cliff edge, the residents decide to put an ambulance down in the valley to treat people when they fall and are injured at the bottom, but that is not this Conservative Government’s approach.
The Government announced in 2015 that they were investing £1.5 billion in smart motorways to help to alleviate the stop-start traffic that is so often the cause of collisions that result in whiplash. Although I am sure you and I are not prone to this, Mr Speaker, lesser mortals than us occasionally use their mobile phone while driving, and this terrible distraction can also lead to accidents that cause whiplash. So what have this Government done about it? In 2017 they increased the penalty for those caught using a mobile phone while driving to six points and a fine of £200. For those caught a second time, the penalty rises to 12 points, a possible ban and a possible £1,000 fine. So it is important that we do not just talk about dealing with the problem of whiplash—how about we try to alleviate it or remove it in the first place? That is what this Government are doing.
This Government are also making sure that we look after the just about managing. In my constituency, which I understand is the most deprived one represented by a Conservative MP, every pound these people have matters to them; it is incredibly important. So if this Bill can go some way to reducing insurance premiums, surely that is to be valued. I have heard the figure of £35 mentioned. Some people might consider that to be insignificant, but when someone is on a low salary, as people in my constituency are, of course every pound matters.
That is not the only thing we have done. When I think about my constituents tuning into Parliament TV, as I am sure they often do at 10 to 7 on a Tuesday evening, I often think they will be considering the debate in isolation. So my job, as their MP, is to try to bring some context to the discussion. They will think, “This is good. I am glad we are introducing this policy that might help to reduce my insurance premium. But what else are you doing on our behalf, Eddie?” I would say, “Well, I am part of the Government that increased the tax-free allowance to £11,850 last year.” To people in my constituency on an average salary of £27,000 that is a hugely significant difference. What else did we do? We increased the minimum wage to £7.83, which has helped 2 million workers. Therefore, we need to consider this in context.
It is so important that we have the injury tariff in this Bill, because that will give us the opportunity to streamline claims and lower premiums, with the hope that that will then be passed on to my constituents. There are a number of things to be valued in the Bill, all of them good Conservative principles. They are just one part of a theme that runs through this Parliament, which is about looking after all the people of the United Kingdom.
Emma Little Pengelly (Belfast South) (DUP)
Thank you for the opportunity to speak in the debate, Mr Speaker. I will try to be as brief as possible. Of course, all the Bill’s clauses refer and apply only to England and Wales, so I thank the Minister for his engagement with me about them, many of which will be of benefit, including those on access to justice at the lower end in relation to the whiplash issues and on the adjustment of the discount rate. I want to raise a particular issue on which I have engaged with the Minister on an ongoing basis: the discount rate situation in Northern Ireland.
As a result of the stagnant and stalled political solution in Northern Ireland, we have not been able to address the unfair discount rate of 2.5%. Let me put that into context. Under that discount rate, an 18-year-old with £100,000 per annum of requirements will get about £5 million to £6 million, whereas under the changed UK rate, that sum would be £9 million. We are therefore talking about a hugely significant difference, particularly for those who have suffered catastrophic injuries through no fault of their own, and it needs to be addressed urgently. Yes, the adjustment of the discount rate under this Bill will narrow the gap, but that gap will still be significant. I have asked the Minister to consider extending the Bill to cover Northern Ireland. I know the legislation will head back to the House of Lords and I understand fully the challenges in introducing this issue, but it is now clear that it could be extended. This is a non-controversial issue. There are people in need and an unfairness in place, so I ask the Minister seriously to consider extending the provision to address this injustice in Northern Ireland.
I beg your indulgence, Mr Speaker, in my putting on record the fact that today is the 25th anniversary of the Shankill bomb. That IRA bomb killed nine innocent civilians, including two children—13-year-old Leanne and seven-year-old Michelle. I just want to pay a tribute, because this Bill is about access to justice. The person who was convicted of that bombing served just seven years and was released under the terms of the Belfast agreement in 2007—that was seven years for nine innocent lives taken by that bomb. I do want to say on record that my thoughts are with the families at this very difficult time. Thank you, Mr Speaker.
Kevin Hollinrake
May I concur with the comments of the hon. Member for Belfast South (Emma Little Pengelly) about that terrible tragedy, and also the terrible injustice that followed in the process of the prosecution of that crime? Our thoughts are with all the families at this moment in time.
The Bill is surely about fairness—making sure that we look after the interests of consumers. I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes) when he said that this Government are championing the cause of the consumer and making sure that we drive down the costs of living. There have been many examples of where we have been able to do that over recent months, such as the cap on energy costs, of course, and the Tenant Fees Bill, which is, as you know, Mr Speaker, something that is very close to my heart as it is related to my previous profession. I say that despite the significant hit to our business—Members can check my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—because it is absolutely the right thing to do. We should look after the interests of consumers and make sure that their interests are fairly represented.
There are other areas in which we seek to legislate, such as leasehold reform to make sure that people do not find that they are paying unfair charges for leasehold properties. That is another instance of how we are trying to drive down the costs of living for our consumers.
The hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) indicated from a sedentary position that he questioned the relevance of my hon. Friend’s points about the fact that we are trying to drive up the standard of living and reduce the costs of living, but it was absolutely relevant, as this is a key strategy of the Government. We want to make sure that we reduce the cost of living and increase the standard of living.
The Bill also, of course, fulfils a manifesto commitment. We were clear in our 2017 manifesto that we would deliver on the promise to reduce insurance costs, and that is what this is all about. We are still making sure that people get fair compensation, but we are reducing car insurance costs for the majority. That, along with simplifying the system, is the principle of this Bill.
It is very disturbing to hear my hon. Friend’s comment that this country is the whiplash capital of the world. It is therefore only right that we take action in this area and try to reduce the excessive costs of whiplash compensation, which do, of course, affect us all. This is not about saying that we will not give people fair and appropriate compensation when accidents happen, but it is about clamping down on the worst excesses. With a 40% increase in the number of claims since 2005-06, it is only right, when our roads are actually safer, that we make sure that any compensation paid for accidents on the road is commensurate with the injury itself.
It is absolutely right that we stand up for genuine claimants, but we must provide fair compensation for those claimants. The Opposition’s amendment 2 was simply a wrecking amendment. It is clear what this Bill is about, and that amendment would have hit right at its heart. Without being able to control the tariffs for compensation, the Bill would have been pointless. I guess that it will not be the last wrecking amendment that we will see in this place over the next few months, but it is absolutely right that this Bill, which implements a manifesto commitment, passes through the House.
It is also right that we try to make sure that insurers pass on the savings from which they will benefit as a result of the Bill. It is right, too, that there is clear supervision of the rules to make sure that those savings are passed on to the consumer.
Let me briefly touch on claims management companies. As my hon. Friend pointed out, despite the fact that many have a bad reputation, they do a very good job in making sure that, when compensation is due, that compensation is paid. I have slight concerns that these claims management companies will now come under the auspices of the Financial Conduct Authority. Hon. Members will recognise that much of the work that I have done in this place has had the aim of trying to hold the banks to account for some of their worst excesses, particularly against small businesses, following the financial crash in 2008, but the regulator has seemed incapable of doing that in many cases. Many people think that the regulator is too close to the banking sector, and I am slightly concerned that it is regulating both ends of the process.
Business without Debate
Mr Speaker
We come now to a number of motions that would, if objected to, be subject to the deferred Division procedure. I would like to take motion 3 first, and on its own.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
Electricity
That the draft Electricity and Gas (Energy Company Obligation) Order 2018, which was laid before this House on 19 July, be approved.—(Iain Stewart.)
The Speaker’s opinion as to the decision of the Question being challenged, the Division was deferred until Wednesday 24 October (Standing Order No. 41A).
Mr Speaker
With the leave of the House, I propose to take motions 4 to 8 together.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 118(6)),
Exiting the European Union (Fees and Charges)
That the draft Department for Transport (Fees) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018, which were laid before this House on 19 July, be approved.
Local Government
That the draft Newcastle Upon Tyne, North Tyneside and Northumberland Combined Authority (Establishment and Functions) Order 2018, which was laid before this House on 4 September, be approved.
Armed Forces
That the draft Armed Forces (Terms of Service) (Amendments Relating to Flexible Working) Regulations 2018, which were laid before this House on 18 July, be approved.
Exiting the European Union (Civil Aviation)
That the draft Civil Aviation (Insurance) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018, which were laid before this House on 23 July, be approved.
Exiting the European Union (Merchant Shipping)
That the draft Merchant Shipping (Monitoring, Reporting and Verification of Carbon Dioxide Emissions) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018, which were laid before this House on 23 July, be approved.—(Iain Stewart.)
Question agreed to.
Mr Speaker
We come to motion 9. Not moved.
SITTING IN WESTMINSTER HALL (29 OCTOBER)
Ordered,
That, notwithstanding the provisions of Standing Order No 10(1)(a), the sitting in Westminster Hall on Monday 29 October shall begin at 5.30 pm and may then continue for up to three hours.—(Iain Stewart.)
Delegated Legislation (Committees)
Ordered,
That the motion in the name of Andrea Leadsom relating to the Electoral Commission be referred to a Delegated Legislation Committee.—(Iain Stewart.)
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I notice that the Government decided not to move motion 9 on time limits on speeches. I was ready to object to it, despite being a member of the Procedure Committee, because I think that it affects intimately the life of many Members of Parliament.
I want to get your advice, Mr Speaker, which is why I think this is a genuine point of order. If I had simply objected to the motion, presumably there would have been a deferred Division, but what I would really like is a debate, because I think that Members are very interested in time limits on speeches. How can we get a debate about this on the Floor of the House?
Mr Speaker
Repeated objection could secure the outcome that the hon. Gentleman seeks. I should just say, for the purposes of clarification, that the motion in question was not deferrable. If memory serves me correctly, motions 3 to 8 were potentially deferrable, but motion 9, which excited the hon. Gentleman to the point that he wished to argue against it and which was not moved by the Government, was not a motion subject to a deferred Division. It was what is known in the trade—not least by our previously bewigged friends who advise the Chair—as a “nod or nothing”, which means that it proceeds on the basis that nobody objects to it, but if somebody objects to it, it does not proceed. If it comes forward on the same basis again and the hon. Gentleman objects—and possibly even without it coming forward on that basis again—time could well be found for a debate. At that point, he would be able to explain, doubtless eloquently and possibly at length, why he was opposed to it. I hope that that is helpful to him, and when he repairs home, he can tell Lady Leigh all about it.
Petitions
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
I rise to present this petition on the green deal scheme on behalf of the residents of North Ayrshire and Arran. It involves the Government-backed scheme called Home Energy and Lifestyle Management Systems, or HELMS.
The petition states:
The petition of the residents of North Ayrshire and Arran,
Declares that the Government backed Green Deal Scheme has affected petitioners as we have suffered a detriment both to our finances, our private and family lives; further that many vulnerable residents have invested their life savings in good faith, and others have accrued up to £17,000 in debt to pay for the work that was carried out; and further that in many cases the installer did not apply for building warrants and as a result we are unable to sell our properties or have the assurance that they are safe to live in, or can be insured.
The petitioners therefore urge the House of Commons to ensure that the Government will compensate and protect people who have found themselves suffering a detriment because of the Government backed Scheme, and take steps to ensure that this cannot happen in the future.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
[P002272]
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
I rise to present this petition on behalf of my constituents in Kilmarnock and Loudoun who have been affected by a combination of green deal mis-selling with the company HELMS and the lack of intervention by and the general failed policy of the UK Government. These constituents have been left paying more in their bills than they would otherwise have had to pay. Some have had feed-in tariffs fraudulently transferred. They have been left without building warrants and left to pay increased statutory fees. They have been left with loans of up to 25 years for photovoltaic panels that actually have a shorter lifespan than the 25-year loan, and they have been left with debt accrued against their properties, which in some cases they cannot sell or even insure.
The petition states:
The petitioners therefore urge the House of Commons to ensure that the Government will compensate and protect people who have found themselves suffering a detriment because of the Government backed Scheme, and take steps to ensure that this cannot happen in the future.
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The petition of residents of Kilmarnock and Loudoun,
Declares that the Government backed Green Deal Scheme has affected petitioners as we have suffered a detriment both to our finances, our private and family lives; further that many vulnerable residents have invested their life savings in good faith, and others have accrued up to £17,000 in debt to pay for the work that was carried out; and further that in many cases the installer did not apply for building warrants and as a result we are unable to sell our properties or have the assurance that they are safe to live in, or can be insured.
The petitioners therefore urge the House of Commons to ensure that the Government will compensate and protect people who have found themselves suffering a detriment because of the Government backed Scheme, and take steps to ensure that this cannot happen in the future.
And the petitioners remain, etc.]
[P002271]
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
I did not want to throw you, Mr Deputy Speaker, by being in my old place, but it is nice to be back up here on the Back Benches for a temporary period.
I rise to present a petition on behalf of my constituents opposing proposals to extend the Bredbury Parkway industrial estate in the Tame valley, Greater Manchester. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) for being in the Chamber to present the same petition from his constituents. This shows the value of this green space to both our constituencies. I thank the residents of Denton and Reddish—a total of 1,440 residents in all—who have signed this petition online and in writing.
The petition declares:
The petition of residents of the United Kingdom,
Declares that proposals to extend the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate deep into the Tame Valley would involve large-scale developments on the Green Belt land, which is a valuable barrier to urban sprawl and is hugely valued by local people, particularly in the areas of Bredbury, Woodley, Denton and Tameside; further declares that this development would destroy the openness of this section of the Tame Valley and damage the visual amenity from the Haughton Dale and Hulme’s Wood Local Nature Reserves; further declare concerns over HGV traffic in the area and the impact that the proposals would have on an already congested Stockport Road and Ashton Road, and the associated effects on the environment.
The petitioners oppose plans to extend the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, Tameside Council and the Department for Communities and Local Government not to support the extension of the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate; and to further urge that the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework (GMSF) must follow principles of a ‘Brownfield First’ strategy, so that previously developed land, including derelict or unused sites, must be fully considered before Green Belt is released for development.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
[P002273]
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
I rise to present a petition in similar terms to that presented by my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne). It has been a pleasure to work with him—he and I are equally committed to the green belt in Stockport and Tameside respectively and wish to encourage a brownfield-first policy. This petition, to protect green-belt land near the Bredbury industrial estate, is added to the similar petitions signed by thousands of my constituents demanding that the Greater Manchester spatial framework is radically redrawn. It is a pleasure for me to present it on behalf of my constituents.
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The petition of residents of the United Kingdom,
Declares that proposals to extend the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate deep into the Tame Valley would involve large-scale developments on the Green Belt land, which is a valuable barrier to urban sprawl and is hugely valued by local people, particularly in the areas of Bredbury, Woodley, Denton and Tameside; further declares that this development would destroy the openness of this section of the Tame Valley and damage the visual amenity from the Haughton Dale and Hulme’s Wood Local Nature Reserves; further declare concerns over HGV traffic in the area and the impact that the proposals would have on an already congested Stockport Road and Ashton Road, and the associated effects on the environment.
The petitioners oppose plans to extend the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, Tameside Council and the Department for Communities and Local Government no to support the extension of the Bredbury Parkway Industrial Estate; and to further urge that the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework (GMSF) must follow principles of a ‘Brownfield First’ strategy, so that previously developed land, including derelict or unused sites, must be fully considered before Green Belt is released for development.
And the petitioners remain, etc.]
[P002274]
Elder Abuse
(6 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair for my first Adjournment debate, Mr Deputy Speaker, as you were for my maiden speech. Long may this tradition continue.
I want to raise the increasingly important issue of elder abuse, a terrible and perhaps poorly understood crime. At its heart is the trust that an older person may rightly expect to establish with another person for reasons of care, but sadly that trust is frequently violated, leading to physical, financial, psychological and even sexual abuse and to some deeply troubling outcomes for victims.
I want to express my disappointment that, to my mind at least, the issue is too often overlooked at national level. Here in Parliament there have been only a handful of mentions of elder abuse in recent years, even though it is a real and growing problem that can occur in an institutional care setting or a private home. Despite elder abuse being such a widespread concern, it does not dominate our discourse in the way that such a despicable act should. That is disappointing, and perhaps some newspapers are right when they accuse us here in Parliament of marginalising a forgotten generation.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I am sure he is aware as I am that families have often had to hide cameras in care homes to film the abuse going on there—we have seen documentaries about that. I agree with him that something should be done about the problem, because elderly people have made a major contribution to this country. Does he agree that there should be better training and better pay for carers, and that the law should be tightened up?
Giles Watling
I agree that there should be financial support, and I also agree about CCTV—I shall come on to those points a little later.
We clearly have a lot to make up for in Parliament, and I hope that today’s debate will prompt some constructive action and, at the very least, go some way towards raising awareness at national level.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the need to raise the issue. I, too, have had constituents who have experienced elder abuse. As people grow older they become more isolated, so the risk of abuse increases. Does he agree that safeguarding adults boards should have a specific focus on older people, and should assess the risk to them and come up with prevention plans?
Giles Watling
I could not agree more. Those boards should have a key role in ensuring that our older people are safe and secure—that is what this is all about.
I am the MP for a constituency where more than 32% of residents are aged over 65—including me, incidentally. That is the highest percentage of any constituency in the country, so it is hardly surprising that I am leading this debate.
John Howell (Henley) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend kindly for giving way; he is being very generous. He is portraying this as a British problem, but does he agree that it is not just a British problem? The World Health Organisation has published material that shows that this is happening all around the world. It is a generational problem that we have to deal with, as he rightly points out.
Giles Watling
I absolutely take my hon. Friend’s point that this happens all over the world, but we must clean up our own act first and make sure that we are far ahead of the game, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Where we lead, others follow.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Each of us in the House tonight has experience of this issue from our constituencies and it is very important. We are absolutely disgusted by the abuse of elderly people in homes across the UK. Is he aware of the recent poll by the charity Action on Elder Abuse, which found that nearly one in 10 older people had experienced serious physical, mental or financial abuse in homes? That would indicate that 23,000 older people have been affected in Northern Ireland and nearly 1 million across the UK. Does he agree that one way of tackling this is to ensure that adequate safeguarding is in place, for example, in care homes, to ensure that older people do not suffer at the hands of those who are there to care for and not abuse them?
Giles Watling
I could not agree more, and I have seen those statistics. We have to remember that this happens not only in care homes, but in private homes where carers come to look after elderly people.
I must admit that since my election last year, elder abuse has not been as prominent in my mind as perhaps it should have been. In fact, it was a meeting with some of our local pensioners who formed the very good group TenPAG—the Tendring Pensioners’ Action Group—in August this year that made me fully appreciate the need to tackle this problem. Having gone away from that meeting and investigated the matter further, I was deeply disturbed by what I found. As the hon. Gentleman pointed out, the statistics are truly shocking. There are 1 million victims of elder abuse every year in the UK, but here is another statistic: only 0.3% of the reported incidents result in a successful criminal conviction. That is not good enough. Convicted abusers often escape with flimsy sentences and trivial fines.
Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech and being generous with his time, which I appreciate is limited. I have also had experience of constituents raising such matters, and particularly financial abuse of the elderly. To declare an interest, I also used to prosecute for Oxfordshire trading standards and came across many people who had been abused in that sense.
There is one category that my hon. Friend has not mentioned: sometimes in their own homes, people can be befriended by strangers for the precise purpose of exploiting and abusing them. Does he condemn that as much as I do—I am sure he does—and will he commend and encourage the volunteer support groups who do so much to ensure that people are not isolated and that such problems are uncovered?
Giles Watling
Absolutely, and I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I could not agree more that elder abuse in people’s homes is, in some way, even more chilling, and I will come to that shortly.
This is not just an appalling failure of justice; the lax approach to punishment fails to deter would-be abusers, who see older people as a soft target, as my hon. Friend pointed out. We must do more to protect older people. We would not fail the victims of child, domestic or sexual abuse in this way, so why are we seemingly happy to fail the victims of elder abuse? Why are we happy for there to be a lower conviction rate for the abuse of older people than for racially motivated crimes, homophobic or transphobic crimes, domestic abuse and disability hate crime? It is simply unacceptable, and I propose that we put elder abuse in its own category in line with these other appalling crimes to improve the justice outcome for victims.
As we have said, elder abuse can take place in a care setting or in a private home, and chillingly the abuser is often well known to the person being abused. They may be a partner, a child or relative, a friend or neighbour, a care worker, a health or social worker or another professional. Older people may even be abused by the person who cares for them—that sounds like an oxymoron, but there it is—and this abuse is potentially very easy to carry out. I remember being put in charge of my late mother’s affairs following the death of my father. I was astonished at the sweeping powers that the enduring power of attorney gave me—powers that could so easily be abused. Fortunately, my mother had a devoted son who saw her live out her days in comfort and security, but sadly that is not always the case, and when that trust is abused the penalties should be severe.
Abuse can be perpetrated anywhere and by anyone, and that has led to some truly awful situations. In Sussex recently, £10 million was stolen from vulnerable fraud victims in just one year. Some 89% of the victims were aged over 60 and 63% were living alone. In Cheshire, as we all may recall, care home workers were filmed abusing an elderly, blind dementia victim. Those abusers were spared jail, despite the public outcry. In Cambridgeshire, a pensioner aged 105 was assaulted—the oldest known victim of elder abuse so far. These incidents, all of which have taken place within the last 18 months, should never have occurred, and I feel for those people who have had to live through these harrowing experiences in what are supposed to be the golden years of their lives. These are people who have done so much to make our country what it is today.
I wish it were not so, but in Clacton we are not immune to these crimes either. In 2016, a resident in my constituency was defrauded out of £57,000 by his carer, who was sentenced to just 15 months in prison, and in 2013, 16 people were arrested for financially abusing 39 people. All the victims were from the Clacton area and were aged between 65 and 99. I have no doubt that many colleagues will have similar stories in their own constituencies.
I also have no doubt that colleagues will have heard about abusive situations in care homes. Unfortunately, these incidents are becoming more common. In fact, researchers at University College London found that 99% of carers across 92 care homes had witnessed or taken part in troubling behaviour. That is an appalling statistic. It is absolutely shocking and a good enough reason, I think, to install CCTV cameras in communal areas. I know that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) is pushing for that outcome, and I give him my full support.
We would be naive to think, however, that elder abuse only occurs in the care home. As we have said, it can be just as common when care is taking place in the home, where standards can slip, corners can be cut and monitoring can become a side issue, thanks to pressures that mean keeping the system going becomes more important than safeguarding. Domiciliary care, or care in the home, is our most common and important form of care, and we need urgently to address long-term social care funding issues in this sector before we see quality suffer.
One way to do that is to secure the future of the adult social care precept, which has been temporarily lifted over the past three years to allow councils to raise additional funds. In my view, that is a good thing. I hope, then, to see the adult social care precept become a permanent resource for local councils, not just to give a funding boost, but to provide a clear long-term funding model outside of general council tax. However, although I am pleased that the Government have also announced a £240 million increase in this sector, I would also point out that it is not just about money.
To make that point further, I should mentioned Guide at Broomfield, a nursing home in Braintree. It decided to close earlier this year and attributed that closure to financial difficulty. If one consults the Care Quality Commission report, however, one will see that the home’s basic failings had nothing to do with funding. Residents were being left in soiled clothing, and that is a basic standard failing, not a financial one. We could compare that with Beaumont House in Walton-on-the-Naze, in my constituency, which I had the pleasure of visiting recently. It is like a five-star hotel, with all the comforts of a house, where guests are treated like human beings, not just clients. It is not a bad place. I thought I would go there once the good people of Clacton were done with me.
I have no doubt that funding is important, but no amount of money will make up for poor standards, and if we are really to really elder abuse, we need to talk about, and rigorously maintain, standards within the adult social care sector. I was interested to read the suggestion from Age UK about how national guidance should be developed on how conversations about abuse can be started and effectively supported by family members, professionals and the older people themselves. I would certainly back this proposal, and I hope the Minister will meet with Age UK to discuss it. I would also like a statutory definition of a crime against an older person and specific elder-protecting legislation to be introduced, as neither currently exists.
What I really want, however, is to see elder abuse become an aggravated offence, although in calling for that change I recognise the steps that the Government have taken to tackle it. For instance, in 2015 domestic abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour became specific offences under the Serious Crime Act. In the same year, a wilful neglect offence was introduced under the Criminal Justice and Courts Act, so there is now criminal liability when a person has been placed under the care of a medical professional. According to the Government’s impact assessment, the new offence was designed to
“ensure that those responsible for the worst failures in care can be held accountable”,
and to
“act as a deterrent, moderating the conduct of individuals who might otherwise be disposed to behave in ways that would constitute an offence.”
Those are laudable aims, but that has not happened. Perpetrators are not being held to account with firm punishments, and the new offence has failed to prevent any further abuses in care. The example from Cheshire that I gave earlier, and the research carried out by UCL, both took place after its introduction. What is more, the new wilful neglect offence, by its very nature, fails to prevent the abuse of older people who are living in their own homes outside a traditional care setting. They are the forgotten victims of elder abuse, and we must not forget them as we seek to address this issue. To protect those who are still living in their own homes, as well as older people in care who may be vulnerable, we must introduce a new offence that punishes elder abuse properly, regardless of its location. Making elder abuse an aggravated offence will do that, which means that there will be harsher sentences for perpetrators.
A mandatory sentencing uplift is already in place for hate crimes motivated by prejudice based on someone’s race, sexual orientation, religion, or disability. I ask, quite simply, why not age? An anomaly in the law needs to be addressed, and that is a change that we can deliver now. As part of the Government’s efforts to update the hate crime action plan, the Law Commission is currently undertaking a review of hate crime legislation, and I am sending it a letter today. The Government have committed themselves to acting on the commission’s specific proposals, and during the review it will consider whether to make elder abuse an aggravated offence. I hope that it, and the Government, will agree with me that this change is needed now.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)
Thank you for calling me, Sir Deputy Speaker! I did not have a chance to say that the other day.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Giles Watling) on securing a debate on a matter that is of immense importance to all of us. He has done a great deal to represent his constituents in relation to policing and community safety issues. I understand that a further 12 officers will be sworn in soon in Tendring district, and I thank him for the important contribution that he is making to the House in this regard.
No older person in the United Kingdom should have to suffer abuse or exploitation at the hands of those who prey on the vulnerable. Criminals should not have the opportunity to target the elderly, but those who do should know that they will not get away with it. Older people should not have to fear being targeted, but those who are should receive the right support. It is a fundamental Government responsibility to keep people safe, and never does that responsibility carry greater weight than when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable in our society. That is why the Government take a multi-pronged approach to tackling this issue, working with local government, the police, and the private and voluntary sectors.
First, we need to ensure that we have the right legislative powers to deter and tackle criminals who target the elderly. Secondly, we need to ensure that all older people are connected to the fabric of society. While society as a whole becomes ever more interconnected, older people across the country still suffer loneliness and social isolation—themes that my hon. Friend drew out so cogently. Thirdly, when older people do suffer abuse, we need to ensure that the justice system treats them appropriately, and that they have ready access to the right support.
Rachael Maskell
The all-party parliamentary group for ageing and older people carried out an inquiry recently with a view to establishing a commission for the rights of older people, so that they can have a voice and an agency in society. Would the Minister support such a proposal?
Victoria Atkins
I am most interested to hear of that work by the all-party group. If plans are drawn up, I will of course look at them with great care, as will other Ministers across Government who have responsibility for helping to look after older people, because although I am answering as Home Office Minister, clearly this issue has huge impact across the Department of Health and Social Care, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and other Departments.
Under current hate crime legislation, targeting an elderly person because they are vulnerable is already an aggravating factor in sentencing. The sentencing guidelines make it clear that these offences should result in a more severe sentence, but we want to look at whether this goes far enough. Last week, we launched the Government’s refreshed hate crime action plan, and as part of that have asked the Law Commission to carry out an independent and wide-ranging review of hate crime legislation. The review will explore whether current legislation is effective and if new hate crime strands should be introduced, such as crimes against the elderly. While we would not wish to prejudge the outcomes of the review, we will study the findings with great interest and will not hesitate to act if there are ways to improve our response. While these are complex issues that deserve proper consideration, all crimes against the elderly are utterly unacceptable, and we will always treat them as such.
But there is more to tackling abuse against older people than making sure we have appropriate legislation in place. Last week the Prime Minister announced the Government’s new loneliness strategy—with cross-party support, I hasten to add. Some 200,000 older people have not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month. Loneliness is linked to a range of damaging health impacts such as heart disease, stroke and Alzheimer’s, and lonely people are more likely to visit a GP or A&E.
Loneliness can cause people to feel detached from their neighbours and neighbourhoods, which may increase their vulnerability to becoming victims of crime, and then being even further isolated if they fall victim to crime. As part of the Home Office’s contribution to the loneliness strategy, we are working with Royal Mail, local authorities and other partners to trial a scheme called “safe and connected”. This involves post workers checking on vulnerable older people twice a week, and reporting any problems to local authorities and voluntary sector organisations. We are investing over £450,000 in this scheme this year, and we are delighted that it has already been rolled out in New Malden, Liverpool and Whitby.
We know, however, that those who are isolated might be more likely to be victims of fraud, and, likewise, being a victim of fraud itself can be an isolating experience. We have therefore also provided support to National Trading Standards for the expansion of its scam marshals scheme. Scam marshals share their own experiences, help others to report and recognise scams, and send any scam mail to the National Trading Standards scam team so it can be used in future investigations and trials.
It is also important to ensure that when older people are victims of abuse and exploitation, the justice system treats them appropriately and they have ready access to the right support services. My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton mentioned the ability of older people, perhaps those suffering from dementia, to give evidence in trials. I used to prosecute fraud, and some cases involved fraud committed against the NHS or social care. One of our greatest difficulties was in getting statements from elderly people who perhaps lacked legal capacity because of their conditions; without their evidence it is difficult to prove cases. We have asked Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services to lead a joint thematic inspection into older people’s experience of the justice system. We will be looking closely at the findings and what we might do to make improvements.
Understandably, Members raised the issue of care, and one Member asked whether the care of elderly people could be included in the safeguarding adults boards. I am told that their purpose is to help and safeguard adults with care and support needs, which includes older people as well.
Through the skills for care programme, which is a piece of work by the Department of Health and Social Care, we are looking to provide services with help and guidance on recruiting people with the right values and skills, and implementing a care certificate for frontline staff to ensure that older and vulnerable people receive the high quality care that they need. In addition, the Government have introduced a fit and proper person test to hold directors to account for care, and brought in new criminal offences of ill treatment and wilful neglect by care workers.
My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton mentioned domestic abuse, and he will know that the Government are hoping to introduce a landmark piece of draft legislation on that by the end of this year. Through my work on that Bill, I have learned, sadly, that domestic abuse can be committed against older people in the home, sometimes by carers, sometimes by members of their own family and, on occasion, by their own children. It is particularly difficult for parents to admit to people outside the family circle that they are victims of abuse at the hands of their children.
We have funded specific services to provide targeted support to hard-to-reach groups, and this is something that we will be looking at carefully across the House during the passage of the Bill. For example, we have provided funding to a charity called Jacksons Lane in north London to engage older people in community-based activities in order to increase their understanding of wellbeing, harassment and domestic abuse and of the support services available to tackle these issues. When it comes to the most heinous crimes against older people, such as domestic and sexual violence, we are determined to ensure that victims get the right support. We know that elderly people can face particular challenges in disclosing abuse, and we are looking at options to provide them with more support, through the draft domestic abuse Bill and through a package of non-legislative measures.
In whatever form abuse takes place, we are working to ensure that we have the right levers in place to protect older people, and that they have access to the right support when they need it. I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for raising the important issue of how we can better protect older people from abuse, and of course we are always open to new ideas and suggestions, and to new circumstances of abuse being brought to our attention. We will continue to look for innovative ways for national and local government, agencies and charities to support the services that help older people to protect themselves from, and recover from, all forms of abuse.
Question put and agreed to.