Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill

Lord Hurd of Westwell Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hurd of Westwell (Con)]

My Lords, I was brought up on a fundamental principle about legislation, which I sometimes feel your Lordships would do well to memorise. It is the following: if it is not necessary to legislate, it is necessary not to legislate. Of course, it is a sweeping statement, and everyone in this House will have occasion to disagree with it, but it is not a bad working principle—and it is a principle that is entirely neglected in this Bill.

Several of my noble friends—my noble friend Lady Hodgson in particular—made general speeches about the importance of volunteering and of not being frightened by the threat of prosecution. I entirely understood and agreed with all that, but where their analysis began to crumble seemed to be on the relevance of their concerns to the Bill in front of us.

The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, speaking for the Opposition, made an admirably cutting, caustic speech, and as he approached the crucial fence, I thought that he was going to take it in style—but, having glared fiercely at it, he turned resolutely away and did not take it. Several noble Lords, no doubt obeying some vestige of party solidarity, agreed with him, the argument being that the Bill is a tiddler, there is no particular harm and no particular good in passing it and we should preserve our nuclear explosives for some great cause—unspecified—which deserves it. I think that is a rather feeble way of running an Opposition, if I may say so: to make a very acute and shrewd, sometimes unfair, analysis of the Lord Chancellor’s proposals and then not take the obvious course of supporting the amendment.

I support the amendment moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, partly because I want to protect, so far as is possible, the principle I mentioned at the beginning, but partly because of the point he made about this business of sending messages. It is very common now to defend a Bill—a change in the law—on the grounds that it sends out a powerful message to some group in the population whom we wish to reach. We have all fallen victim to this at one time or another. I very rarely meet members of the population who have been bowled over or entirely convinced by the speeches made, or even by votes taken in this House. It does not work like that.

If you are going to encourage people to volunteer, you have to do what my son in the other place has been trying to do until recently—to persuade them to volunteer; to deal with their doubts and fears. It is a public relations exercise. That is not to say that it is useless or to be critical of it; it is necessary to persuade. Passing laws in this House or in the other place is not an adequate way of doing this, particularly when the differences between one text and another—for example between “shall” and “might”—are minimal, as has been analysed in this debate.

If you are contemplating a brave action which may carry some risk, such as diving into a pool or rescuing somebody from a dangerous situation, you are almost certainly taking a quick decision on the spur of the moment. You are not going to creep away and find a book to memorise the course of a debate in your Lordships’ House. So this is a bad way of sending a message. The message is good and well meaning, but we should not clutter the law book of this Parliament with such messages. If one were starting again and had plenty of time and no precedent, one could make a more glorious Bill than Section 1 of the Compensation Act. Nevertheless, we do not have that time and that luxury, and it is a mistake to think that we should gild the lily by passing this Bill.