Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood]

My Lords, I, too, support these amendments. For a number of years before the passing of the 1974 Act, I enjoyed a reasonably successful practice at the Bar, often instructed on behalf of employers’ insurers defending negligence claims by injured workmen. Mostly these claims were settled, quite often for substantially less than their true value, because of course the insurers, for whom I acted, were altogether better able than the claimants were to risk losing them. A number of these claims were lost —I defeated them—because the claimants were not quite able to assemble all the evidence necessary to prove actual negligence.

The 1974 legislation, which Clause 62 is designed to overturn, introduced a sea change in the approach to damages claims for workplace injuries. No longer was it necessary to prove that the employers knew, or should reasonably have recognised, that their machinery, equipment, systems of work or workplaces were actually dangerous, it was sufficient to show that regulations designed to secure the workforce’s safety had been breached and that, in consequence, the employee had suffered often appalling injury. Thereafter most claims were settled early, at their true value and with very little in the way of litigation costs. Of course, we at the Bar suffered for this change, because our personal injury practices were greatly damaged, but almost everybody else benefited. Injured workmen obviously did but so too did the Exchequer, because benefits for their injuries thereafter were paid by the insurers out of the premium moneys they had received instead of the cost being put on the state. Safety conditions in the workplace were hugely improved. There is nothing like strict liability, or its civil equivalent, to induce employers to take proactive steps to ensure that the risks and dangers are reduced to a minimum. Employers’ insurers therefore, since 1974, have had altogether fewer claims to meet and have certainly incurred far fewer legal costs in meeting them.

Nothing I have yet read from earlier debates, or heard, has suggested to me that any clear advantage is to be gained by this proposed change in the law. Which precisely, one asks, are the supposed undeserving claims that in future it is intended shall fail when presently they succeed? I confess I did not find the answer to that in the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, the substance of which seemed to be directed rather to unfair dismissal claims than to claims for injured workmen, essentially against insurers, in respect of whom employers are bound to take action.

[The Earl of Erroll]

As a quick correction, it was nothing to do with unfair dismissal, it was about the health and safety issues which come up the whole time in certain industries, particularly agriculture and things like that. That is what I was thinking about mostly.