Civil Liability (Information Requirements) and Risk Transformation (Amendment) Regulations 2020 Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
Main Page: Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Conservative - Life peer)Civil Liability (Information Requirements) and Risk Transformation (Amendment) Regulations 2020
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on his clear exposition on quite a technical matter. I think that this is the first time I have participated in a debate where he is on the Front Bench—in the pound seat, so to speak—and we look forward to hearing his summary after we have raised our questions.
As I did earlier, I declare an interest as the chairman of the SLSC, whose report is included in the papers my noble friend referred to, but I am now speaking in my own capacity, not as the chairman or indeed for any member of that committee. I am speaking because I took a considerable interest in the proceedings on the Civil Liability Bill as it then was, now the Civil Liability Act. On several occasions, the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, and I, along with many others, laboured long into the night to get what I thought was a pretty good cross-party consensus as to the right way forward.
I was glad to do that because I was very supportive of the policy behind the Act; it sought to bring fairness to a very complex area that is also highly emotionally charged. When people suffer life-changing injuries, they and their families are inevitably extremely upset, as anyone would be because one’s life has been completely wrecked. It is important to keep their position in mind, but we also had to remember that not all our fellow citizens are saints and there are people who might be inclined to push the envelope rather, so we had to make sure that their position was balanced.
There are essentially three interested parties in these cases: on the one hand is the injured party—or at least the allegedly injured person—while on the other are the other insured persons in the class covered. That is because this is not a risk-free, cost-free change. If insurance companies pay out on policies on which proper damages should not be paid, the costs fall in part on the other people in the insured class. For those Members of your Lordships’ House who are of a greater age than my noble friend on the Front Bench, it is of course insured drivers aged over 60 who pay a particularly heavy premium on these things. Finally, there are the insurance companies, which have to satisfy their shareholders of a reasonable degree of profitability. As was hinted at in my noble friend’s exposition, they are the least popular of the three parties.
I have two specific areas of concern about this to record with my noble friend. First is the way the discount rate applicable to sums awarded for personal injuries is calculated and set forward. This is a technical matter. If you are awarded a lump sum to look after your terrible injuries, it is not dead money; it will earn a return. The difficult issue is therefore to decide what rate should be applied to the sum to make sure it is fair to all parties. The Ogden rate, as it is called, is set by the Lord Chancellor, now the Secretary of State for Justice.
Consequential changes from changes in the rate are huge, and politicians are therefore understandably fearful. From 2001 to 2015, the Ogden rate was unchanged at 2.5%. In 2001 it was perfectly fair, but by 2015 it was patently unfair. The level of interest rates meant that you were quite unable to earn the return of 2.5% on the lump sum awarded to you. That was terribly unfair and wrong to people looking to it to look after their injuries incurred at work, on the road or wherever. In that latter year, the then Secretary of State for Justice suddenly, with a jerk on the tiller, moved the discount rate from 2.5% to minus 0.75%. That meant that the NHS had to find another £9 billion to compensate for the injuries expected actuarially out of its doing business; £9 billion was suddenly hoovered up and had to be put aside.
Such swings are clearly very unhelpful and the whole area needs more frequent reviews. It was not a matter of cross-party dispute; we all agreed that it needed a proper procedure. It needed a proper procedure also to provide the Ministers having to take this difficult decision—the Secretary of State for Justice, the Lord Chancellor—with some air cover. We needed a procedure so that every so often we had to go through the whole routine and ramifications of it and come up with an answer. That would then provide the Secretary of State for Justice, the Lord Chancellor, with a rationale for making a decision, instead of having to do it out of the blue on their own.
As a result of the final shape of the Act, the procedure was put in place and went to work. The Ministry of Justice guided the market as it would be, between 0% and 1% when the first review took place—but it never happened. It went to the Treasury, and when it came back another 1% had been taken off it, so all the work we had done—the way we had achieved cross-party consensus, not only in this building politically but externally with industry and all the interested parties—was set at naught. That seems a terrible waste and a terrible mistake, because once politicians of any party have to get involved in this, the numbers are so great that they are terrified and will not make a change, and we get into the position in which we found ourselves in the past.
If not this afternoon, perhaps my noble friend could illuminate people at the Committee today, such as my noble friend Lady Kramer—I think I can call her “my noble friend” on this matter—on some of the ways the Government reached the sudden decision not to accept the number recommended by the Committee. That is the first question.
The second question relates to the Civil Liability Act and the soft-tissue whiplash injuries. As my noble friend will be aware, this is not a medical condition that lends itself to easy diagnosis. People with malice aforethought can therefore ride the system. I discovered that at Runcorn railway station. I chair a company at Runcorn. I arrived there and took a taxi—a 10-minute ride—to the place where the company meets. The driver and I talked about whiplash. He said, “Oh, yes, it’s called cash for crash.” I said, “How does it work?” He said, “It’s quite simple. Four or five people—maybe half a dozen—buy a banger for 150 quid and they arrange to crash it into a taxi.” I asked, “Why do they crash into a taxi?” He replied, “Oh, because they know it will be insured, otherwise the local authority would not give them a licence. They also know that if we make too much of a fuss and complain, we may not get our licence renewed by the local authority, because we are seen not to be helpful to people who have been injured.” This is the other side of a situation where some people have terrible injuries: there are people who have been gaming the system in a terrible way.
It was clear that if the proposals under the Act were brought into effect there would be substantial savings. The question was where those savings would fall. As my noble friend Lord Parkinson pointed out, appropriately, there was a concern that too much would end up with the shareholders of insurance companies. My committee made the point about the time, and my noble friend has rebutted that by saying, “Of course, we haven’t been able to begin collecting the data till August 2020.” The Act took effect on 1 January 2019, so we will have had a year and a half. It is important from the point of view of how insurance companies present themselves that they should be able to show that they are clean-handed. By March 2025, when the report comes out, we will be eight years on from when this was a big issue. It is only fair that where people have done their stuff in the industry, they should be able to say so and show it in slightly less than seven years.
Perhaps I may raise one last technical question about the way in which these savings are going to be shown. It is about periodical payment orders. One does not have to be awarded all the money in a lump sum. One can be awarded it on a PPO, as it is called, where one gets an amount of money every month, every quarter or every year depending on one’s circumstances. I have always felt that to be a sensible way to proceed. If you have a terrible crash at 25, the doctor will examine you and say, “I think you’re probably going to die when you’re 45”. Therefore, the sum awarded to you by the court is for 20 years. You may be unlucky and die at 45, but you may be lucky and live on. That means that if you live to 50 or 55, the end of your life will be lived in much reduced financial circumstances because your award will have run out.
PPOs are an important way forward, but they are not liked by insurance companies because they cannot put a pink ribbon around the file and say, “We have paid out our £1 million, £2 million”—or whatever the number is—“and it is done.” They are left with this tail of having to pay out so much every week, month, quarter or whatever and will therefore have to allow for that, and account for it, in how they set up their financial statements. There is therefore a bit of a temptation to push people towards a nice lump sum. The awful reality is that, if you say, “Here’s 5 million quid, or here is what seems a smaller sum on a monthly basis”, people will say, “Oh, I’ll take the big number because it looks good”. When we look at the way in which the calculations are done, to show how insurance companies have made the savings—and shared them—I hope that there will be no implicit bias in how they are drawn up to make it less likely that people can get periodical payment orders.
Before I close, could I go completely off-piste? We know about insurance companies being unpopular, so I want to ask my noble friend a Covid-19 question. I quite understand he probably will not be able to reply, but it would be helpful if I could put it on the record now. He might then be able to reply to me and the other members of the Committee shortly.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, because I could probably just say, “I agree with Lord Hodgson”, and sit down. I want to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, to his new role, as this is my first opportunity to do so. He is getting to meet the geeks; he has several of them here in the Room today. I am afraid we are going to be part of his future.
I know that the last point the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made on coronavirus does not apply to this SI, but it underscores the significance of looking at the resilience of our insurance industry. Thanks to our success in being a hub for international insurance, an awful lot of liabilities are carried in the UK as a consequence of business done well outside the UK. The resilience of this sector will be absolutely critical to overall financial stability. I wish the Minister well in trying to work his way through what will be a very sensitive and difficult process. As the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has reminded us, it will impact not just at the macro scale; it will come down to sectors, businesses and small and large employers, which will be impacted.
In the many hours—all late at night, for reasons I can never quite remember—when we put together the Civil Liability Act, much of my focus was on trying to determine a way to deliver a personal injury discount rate that made some sort of sense. On the rate in play prior to the Act, I think someone had probably decided in 2001 what a sensible number to use was, and then looked around for a reference rate that would provide it. It was related to the yield in gilts at that point, as I remember.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
It was the Wells v Wells case, in which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, was involved—the noble Baroness may recall that he interrupted us several times on it. That is how it was set; it was linked to the index-linked gilt rate.
Baroness Kramer
Of course, as the years went by it became evident that it no longer made sense. If I remember right—if I am wrong, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, will correct me—the way in which the lump sum is calculated is that award is made on an estimate of the length of time the individual will live, and the degree of injury and cost that will be consequent over that time. Therefore, the discount rate is the mechanism for bringing it back to a number which creates the lump sum. Even a very minor variation in that number creates a very different lump sum.
As we and the Treasury hunted around, it became impossible to find a reference rate that would work for all purposes: hence the move to say that the Lord Chancellor should make that decision, but with the advice of an expert panel. The expert panel was seen as an important part of it because there were so many changing and subjective elements that, in a constantly changing set of economies, would undoubtedly have play. All we were certain of was that 2.5%, the old rate, was not right and that minus 0.75%, which as I remember was the result of the Treasury finally going back and looking at its reference rate using the same methodology as in 2001, was obviously complete nonsense. It assumed that if you had a lump sum and were going to invest it, you would, first, do so on a risk-free basis and, secondly, look at such a narrow range of instruments into which to invest it that you would get only negative yield. None of us could think that even the most incompetent financial adviser would suggest investing money in that way, when there were plenty of secure ways. Even putting it into a bank savings account with a guarantee on it would have yielded far more, so it was clearly all wrong.
What has distressed all of us—I join the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, in this—is that the advice of that expert panel was not taken. It was overridden, and instead of a number somewhere between 0% and 1%, which gave a lot of discretion to the Lord Chancellor, we ended up with minus 0.25%. That was not as bad as the minus 0.75%, which is obviously devastating as a discount rate, giving you a huge lump sum as a consequence. But it was still a number that most people felt could be justified only by someone looking at an ultra-conservative, unrealistically constrained investment strategy of that lump sum which would have to, as it were, deliver over the remaining life of the individual who had been injured.
We were all very concerned not to disadvantage someone who was being given a proper award for injuries they had sustained. That was never the purpose. Nor was it the purpose to be unfair in the way we treated insurance companies—less because we all love insurance companies and very much more because we know the cost is passed on. We heard a great deal from those who spoke up for young drivers, who often carry the highest premiums and, as a consequence of the original assessment of minus 0.75%, were going to see huge increases to their annual premiums, perhaps as high as £75 a year added on to the premium. We all knew that was completely inappropriate.
I ask the Minister as part of this—even though it is not within the language of the statutory instrument itself—to go back and try to understand why the recommendations of the expert panel were set aside. It seems we have never heard a sufficient explanation as to why it happened. If the expert panel is not going to be the answer, it seems we have to go back and look at some other system that everybody can rely on and have faith in.
As for the SI itself, I join the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, in thinking, “Come on, guys—2025?” We are all slightly cynical and would like assurance a lot earlier that the revenue accrued, as a consequence of the change, is being passed through to the customer. That was an assurance given to us by the industry. I know that many of us who spoke up in favour of finding a new way to provide a personal injury discount rate did so only because we had that absolute assurance from the industry: that the money would be a pass-through and not a further distribution to shareholders.
I have no problem with the more technical aspects of this SI. It is just a good lesson that statutory instruments drafted in haste nearly always need to be changed sometime within the following 18 months. This is an introduction to that for this Minister. I am sure we will meet again around the table, changing statutory instruments—I seem to spend a large part of my life doing that. I thank again the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, who covered all the issues. I support anything he said.