Health and Safety: Common Sense Common Safety

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

My Lords, I begin by declaring my interest as chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority and patron of the Mountain Training Trust.

The report of the noble Lord, Lord Young, is very valuable and welcome and gets most things absolutely right, although there are one or two areas where further thought and work are needed. I want to highlight two points, one in each category. First, I give the report more than full marks for its comments on the role and availability of adventure activities in education. Giving pupils and children a sense of adventure, a taste of the great outdoors and the opportunity to engage in climbing, canoeing, sailing or other potentially dangerous and risky activities is an absolutely essential and valuable part of their education. This is particularly true for children and pupils in our inner cities who have virtually no other access to the great outdoors. Adventure activities induce a sense of risk, responsibility, teamwork, self-reliance, self-esteem and the full development of a child’s potential and had a profound impact on my own upbringing. The two weeks that I spent on a school expedition in the north-west highlands of Scotland changed my life. The opportunity for other children to enjoy that sort of opportunity has diminished severely over recent years as a result of the risk averseness within the system, and we need to do something about it. Absolutely anything that can be done to implement the noble Lord’s proposals to free up opportunities for adventure for pupils and children will be enormously welcome.

The second area I want to highlight is that of no-win no-fee legal compensation claims, and especially the role that advertising plays. We need to do more work on the role of advertising because I venture to suspect that the principal problem here is the product itself rather than the way in which it is advertised. I have a number of observations to make. First, it is surely important that ordinary people of limited means have access to justice and remediation if they suffer the consequences of someone else’s negligence. Secondly, it is important that information about the availability of redress, and how to access it, is readily and prominently placed in the public domain. Thirdly, as the report itself acknowledges, the perception is that there has been an explosion in no-win no-fee compensation claims; in fact, the reality is that there has not. Fourthly, existing evidence on the role that advertising plays in stimulating unjustified claims is equivocal at best.

In 2006, the ASA, with the then Department for Constitutional Affairs, part funded comprehensive research into the effects of advertising on the compensation culture. It was an important piece of detailed work, because advertising is, of course, a complex medium. It works on many levels and it is not always easy to work out what role it plays, given that there might be a number of different influences on the behaviour of individuals and claimants. The research, The Effects of Advertising in Respect of Compensation Claims for Personal Injuries, aimed at discovering what effect this sort of advertising had on the perceptions and attitudes of its audience, and what detrimental or beneficial effects it had. The central finding of the research was that it appears that advertising cannot be blamed as the primary source for fuelling the compensation culture. The research shows that consumers receive information from a wide variety of sources, and it is a combination of those sources that gives rise to the false impression that there is an increased level of compensation claiming.

That research was carried out some years ago. It is important that before rushing to change we should probably update that research and find out more. As I have already said in reply to the generous letter of the noble Lord, Lord Young, to me as chairman, we at the ASA will very warmly welcome any new evidence that his team might have unearthed or might wish to unearth, and we will consider it very carefully indeed. Any regulation, as the Government rightly believe, must be based on sound evidence and be fair and proportionate. In the mean time, the self-regulatory system, of which the ASA Council is the independent arbiter, will robustly apply the current rules in order to provide protection for the consumer and to avoid any misleading or inaccurate selling.

I have time for just one other point. A particular issue might need addressing separately—the offering of inducements by claim management and claim introduction companies to entice people into claiming. This practice deserves early examination, and I suggest that the principal mischief is not the advertising of inducements but the existence of a system that allows the possibility of an inducement. That is what I urge the Government to look seriously at.

This is a valuable report. In many respects, it says enormously sensible things. On one or two things, we need to do more work.