Health and Safety: Common Sense Common Safety

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Wirral]

My Lords, it is my privilege to pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Faulks for what I believe to have been one of the best maiden speeches that we have heard in this Chamber. Not only is my noble friend known as a supreme advocate but also he has a fine balance in his attitude towards right and wrong, which we heard in his reference to the Human Rights Act. He is also a foremost barrister. He gave us an indication that it is about 37 years since he was called to the Bar, but last year he achieved a great accolade in becoming the “Personal Injury and Clinical Negligence Silk of the Year”. I think we all know why. It is because he has established an outstanding reputation as one of our foremost legal practitioners. We look forward to many speeches from my noble friend in the future.

Declaring my interest as a partner now for 41 years in the national commercial law firm Beachcroft LLP, as president of the All-Party Group on Occupational Safety and Health and as deputy president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, I am delighted that my friend opposite, the noble Lord, Lord Jordan, is going to follow me. He is my president, and I am sure that I shall agree very much with what he says.

I warmly welcome the report of my noble friend Lord Young of Graffham, not least for the clear and concise way in which he has covered some complex problems. It is this simplifying style which must surely underpin our approach to the whole issue of the compensation culture and how to solve it.

This debate is remarkable because I found myself in complete agreement with every word that the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, said. Claims management companies or “claims farmers”, as I prefer to term them, seem to specialise in trying to make the system more mysterious and more complex. In truth, that suits their purposes, because the more complex is the process, the more it is alleged that you need specialist advice to unlock its mysteries. Complexity is the friend of the claims farmer; simplicity and clarity are the enemies.

We have heard many speeches today about whether we have a compensation culture. My first contribution on this subject was to a debate in the other place on the report of the Royal Commission on Civil Liability and Compensation for Personal Injury, chaired by Lord Pearson, as far back as 1978. I have not changed my views since then. I shall not repeat them now, except to make three short points: first, sadly, I believe that we now have a compensation culture; secondly, the solution is to put genuine claimants back at the centre of the whole process; and, thirdly, health and safety legislation must now focus on what business can do, not on what it cannot.

In his report of 2004, Sir David Arculus found only a perception of a compensation culture, but no-win, no-fee excesses, coupled with a system of lawyers paying ever growing referral fees to claims farmers and others, have created a regime in which the high-pressure selling techniques so clearly outlined by my noble friend can flourish. With those advertising techniques that we are now seeing, a claim for compensation is seen not as the means by which genuine claimants can receive proper redress, but as some sort of windfall or bonus.

Sir David Arculus's views were based on statistics as to claims costs from 2000, which predated the use of conditional fee agreements. We now have the advantage of the compendious review of civil litigation costs by Lord Justice Jackson—one of my partners at Beachcroft, Andrew Parker, was one of the assessors in that review. I pay tribute to Sir Rupert not only for the breadth of his report but for the way in which he has considered all the vested interests and has delivered recommendations which are in the public interest. It is a salutary lesson to us all. My noble friend Lord Young is right to conclude that the Jackson review should be implemented in full. What that means in practice is that the attitude of the claims farmers which I have described has to be removed, so that any incident must not necessarily lead to compensation but could and occasionally should lead to some form of redress.

Today's claimant is told that he needs a lawyer on no win, no fee, a claims farmer, and an “after the event” legal expenses policy to cover the risk of losing. All those mouths need to be fed. By the time the lawyer, the farmer, the broker and the others have had their cut, the claimant's interests trail in in some remote fourth or fifth. That is why I wholeheartedly endorse the conclusions of both Sir Rupert and my noble friend that we must have strictly controlled legal costs in all injury claims of up to £25,000 in value. I am delighted to hear that my friends and colleagues in the National Health Service Litigation Authority have also put forward a proposal to my noble friend which I strongly support.

The approach in health and safety has now to change from “you can't” to “you can”. No one will deny that we have made great strides in reducing fatal and serious accidents. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, concluded correctly by echoing the words of the Prime Minister in the foreword to the report: “We simply cannot go on like this”. This time, we really can deliver and we must follow this through in the way that my noble friend has so clearly outlined.