Civil Liability Bill [HL]

Lord Monks Excerpts

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 27th June 2018 Lords Chamber

I should point out that Amendment 6 is identical to the Amendment 90 tabled on Report by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. It was he who spotted the commencement problem and first proposed the solution, so any credit really belongs to him. I am also deeply obliged to the Ministers and the Bill team for their thorough, extensive and always courteous engagement. I beg to move.

[Lord Monks (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps I might mark this Third Reading by drawing attention to what I regard as the significance of the Bill. It is not just a technical Bill about the many legal procedures and complications which we have debated. It is a Bill which, particularly in its relationship to the small claims limit, will have a profound impact on around 350,000 people a year, who we estimate will be left without the free legal cover that they now experience. That is as a result of the rise in the small claims limit. The Minister is looking a bit askance at me as I speak on this amendment, but it seems to me important that we mark the fact that this is a Bill of real significance to a lot of vulnerable people in this country.

Those of us who have been concerned with this issue have been hamstrung by the fact that we have not managed to secure the small claims limit to be within scope of the Bill. We did, in the end, find a way to debate it on Report and there was a vote on it, which I accept that we lost, but we had little time to brief Members of this House or to campaign more widely. I give notice that we will return to the small claims limit issues in any way that we can. I draw the Government’s attention to the fact that one of their justifications for the rises has been to use RPI movements, but the national statistician is now on record as saying that the RPI is a very bad statistic. The CPI is certainly the way to go and it would produce a small claims limit, in the way that Lord Jackson recommended, of £1,500 rather than £2,000. That would make an appreciable difference.

Will the Government think a little further about this issue? Will they reflect on it again, even at this late stage as the Bill goes to the other place? I know that appeals to a Government’s better nature do not usually get very far, but I hope that an exception will be made in this case, and that the right thing will be done after all the debates we have had. The Bill would be improved if the associated measure on the small claims limit was adopted in the way that we have been proposing.