Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, I am most grateful, particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for coming to my rescue. Having done that, I hope he will not be disappointed by what I am about to say.

I support the Bill, and certainly the way in which my noble friend on the Front Bench brought it forward. The final remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, about dividing on the Second Reading of a Bill need careful reflection and I concur with his reservations over having to do so. There are times when the House recognises the importance of a Bill by perhaps stepping away from our usual procedures. I am not saying that this is an unimportant Bill; I have some issues with it on which I should like reassurance from my noble friend— none the less, I support it.

We are a litigious society, which I know is a generalisation. But the more litigious that we have become as a society, the more risk-averse we have become. Which is the chicken and which is the egg? Have we become more risk-averse because we have become more litigious, or vice versa? I have no polls, studies or focus groups to back up the generalisation, but I served for nearly 20 years in another place and dealt with 84,000 constituents. Since the Boy’s Own Annual—which I thoroughly enjoyed when my brothers received copies for Christmas—was published, I have seen a fundamental shift in the casework and issues brought to me by those running voluntary organisations and in our uniformed services. We are not in that era. Things have changed. If anyone wants a snapshot, to be reminded of just how things have changed, in this country a game of conkers is regarded as a dangerous sport. Conkers requires risk assessments. Some local authorities have chopped down chestnut trees to prevent conkers falling on people’s heads. That is the backdrop against which we look at the reasons why the general public have real concerns.

I shall look at this from the perspectives of two different groups of people. The first is that of the general public, people who do things on a genuinely voluntary basis—that is, supporting voluntary groups and organisations. Over the years, I have known a huge number of people who run these voluntary organisations, including the Brownies, the Girl Guides and the sea scouts. These are organisations for which people give up their time to promote within young people a sense not just of well-being but of purpose and of things that will fashion how they develop into mature, responsible adults. I take my hat off to people—often the busiest people—who give up their time to do that. Over the years, however, they have become more and more concerned when they take young people away.

I was a Devon MP, and it is quite common for the whole area of Dartmoor to be seen as one of those areas where you take young people to test the parameters of how they work as a group and what they do in an outward bound environment. Yet the people responsible for taking them have become more and more nervous of the responsibility because of the compensation culture, the risk-averse society and the need for risk assessments, which are important but have, perhaps, gone well beyond what a previous generation would have regarded as proportionate.

I believe that there is that feeling and that those people and society need reassurance. When I used to employ staff down at the other end, I would occasionally take someone in for the last weeks of term, when they were about to leave school at the age of 18, to give them a couple of weeks’ experience of what life was like here before they went on a gap year or to university. I always had to fill in a risk-assessment form. I remember the first time I had to do it and writing to the authorities in the House of Commons to ask, “What should I say is the biggest risk in having a young person of 18 in my office for two weeks?”. I was told that it was the risk of a terrorist attack.

Those are the realities of life that a lot of people have to deal with. It makes you think—there is a risk of a terrorist attack while having an 18 year-old working in an office down the Corridor. These are not just trivial things; they are things that responsible employers, caring parents, teachers and volunteers have to address every day of their lives if they are to pursue their wish to enable young people to take the opportunity of these types of activities. From that perspective, I believe it is very important for the Bill to give some clarity to what can be expected in terms of the legislation that goes with such activities.

There is another group of people for whom I should like some reassurance from my noble friend. Every year, I have the great privilege to host the ambulance service awards in this House. Each year, we see the most wonderful examples of heroism within a range of ambulance services—the NHS, private, third sector and, of course, those very important people who provide the Medevac relief in our armed services. We have heard testimony in this House from former chief constables about the dilemmas they have faced when, for example, a uniformed officer has gone beyond the call of duty and has disobeyed force orders to go into a pond or a lake to pull out someone who might be drowning. The problem for chief constables, as I believe the record of the House shows, is that if that person going in on their own, without back-up or support, gets into difficulties and is injured or even dies, the relatives or next of kin can come to the police force for compensation for the injury and damage that the police officer received while on duty. That would apply to just about all our uniformed services.

The debate has been small and amusing so far, but I hope that my noble friend will reassure me when he winds up that this piece of legislation will ensure that chief constables and those who lead and have to set out the day-to-day rules for our uniformed services will no longer have to feel that they must keep the people they employ on a string when they are faced with an emergency or something that puts the life of a person in danger. I see that the noble Lord is looking rather perplexed at this, but we have seen examples of it and have discussed exactly that in a Home Office debate during this Parliament, with former chief constables explaining what the difficulties are for them. I hope that my noble friend will be able to clarify that.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, in his opening remarks, said that he had come to bury my noble friend. Shakespeare, in all his glory, did not manage to save the Roman Empire, so I live in hope.