Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill

Sadiq Khan Excerpts

Monday 21st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

It is customary, after a reshuffle, to welcome to their places the new Ministers who have been promoted by the Prime Minister. I appreciate that there were a couple of days when the Ministry of Justice was without Ministers and I appreciate that the new ones are part time and unpaid, but I am surprised that they are not here to share the glory of this five-clause Bill. In their absence, I congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) on his new role, and welcome my good friend the Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims, the right hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) to his new role. It is pleasing that there were finally some willing takers to take up the opportunities in the Ministry of Justice and I wish them luck in their jobs. They will need it over the next 10 months.

So here we are, on the final Monday before the summer recess, in the fifth year of this coalition Government, discussing a five-clause Bill which has been variously described as “complete gobbledygook”, “a turkey” and my favourite one, “the gallinaceous love child” of the Secretary of State and the Minister for Government Policy. Perhaps the most painful of all insults comes from the ConservativeHome blog. The editor of that site put the Bill on the list of those that should not be in the Queen’s Speech. That is how much the Conservative activists think of the Bill. It is hardly a glowing list of endorsements that herald its arrival.

In his own puff piece for the Bill on ConservativeHome, the Justice Secretary wrote:

“SARAH has taken a while to bring to the fore, and she is now getting ready for her debut in the world.”

Given the rather flat reviews that SARAH’s debut has so far received, I cannot help but wonder whether she should ever have seen the light of day.

[Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

If the right hon. Gentleman takes that view of the Bill, why is he not going to oppose it? And why have Labour MPs been told that they are on a one-line Whip, which means that they need not be here?

[Sadiq Khan]

The right hon. Gentleman should give me a chance to complete my speech. Then we can discuss what we are going to do. He has been here for many Parliaments and he will know that we take the opportunity where we can to improve Bills, even five-clause nonsense Bills, in Committee. I look forward to working with him to improve the Bill during the remaining stages of its passage through the Commons.

I have referred to the fact that the Bill has only five clauses, and I accept that we should not necessarily judge its quality by its length, but if we strip out the first clause, which sets the scene, and the fifth, which deals with extent and commencement, it is only a three-clause Bill. It is so small that the short title is almost longer than the Bill itself. Does the content really warrant a Bill of its own?

It goes without saying that we all support those who volunteer. We want to see even more people contributing their time to good causes and to the vibrancy of civil society and communities throughout the country. We do not want to live in a country where there are unnecessary barriers in the way of those who want to donate their time to helping in the local community, nor do we want to live in a society where people feel unable to help out in an emergency because of a fear of litigation. But the premise of the Bill is built on sand. The Justice Secretary has stated:

“All too often people who are doing the right thing in our society feel constrained by the fear that they are the ones who will end up facing a lawsuit”,

and he repeated that in his Second Reading opening speech. One might think that such a sweeping statement would be followed up with some concrete examples of where that has happened, or perhaps some statistics to back it up, but no. Instead we are given generally wishy-washy scenarios where people and organisations might—I stress the word “might”—be put off by fear of litigation.

[Chris Grayling]

How does the right hon. Gentleman therefore explain the 30% increase in three years in personal injury claims?

[Sadiq Khan]

I am pleased that the Justice Secretary asks that question because the Ministry of Justice has confirmed that the number of civil cases is going down, not up. It would be worth his spending some time looking at his own statistics. He spent a great deal of time during his speech talking about all the progress that he has made in reducing the number of personal injury cases. Either his reforms are not working or the statistics from his Department are wrong. He must decide which it is.

During his 30-minute speech he gave us no hard facts, no proof and no evidence. We know he has previous when it comes to lack of evidence. We have seen the meltdown in probation that has come about because of his Government’s reckless and half-baked probation privatisation—all done, again, without any evidence, let alone testing or piloting; nothing to show it would work or would not risk public safety. The Justice Secretary said at the Dispatch Box that he trusted his instinct ahead of hard statistical evidence—the same instinct that brought us the Work programme and that delivered a prison crisis has now brought us SARAH.

The Justice Secretary tried to give the impression that there was a problem, and he referred to the impact assessment. I can imagine the fear in his officials’ eyes when they were told to go and find some evidence—any evidence—to support the aims of his Bill. But the Justice Secretary should have been worried when all they could come back with was a survey—a survey—from 2006-07, when the ink was not even dry on the Compensation Act 2006. How can he use as evidence a survey done when the 2006 legislation, which many people think deals adequately with the problems that he says he wants to solve, had barely come into force? In fact, there is plenty of evidence out there, as the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd) said, that contradicts the Government’s claim. A Cabinet Office report from 2013 shows not a fall but a rise in volunteering, confirmed also this week by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Volunteering is going up, not down.

[Mr Hurd]

The right hon. Gentleman is entirely right, and both sides of the House should celebrate that. It is in part the result of significant Government interventions to remove barriers and reform Criminal Record Bureau checks, and to invest in the opportunities to volunteer, not least the National Citizen Service. This is another milestone on that journey of removing barriers. Yes, volunteering is rising, but still, 20% of volunteers do 80% of the giving. There is so much potential to do more, but far too many people are put off by the risk of being sued, and this Bill aims to create a greater sense of reassurance on that fundamental point.

[Sadiq Khan]

I am grateful for that intervention because it means that I can refer to the evidence on the barriers to volunteering. The biggest obstacle is a lack of spare time—60% of respondents said that this applied to them a lot and 23% said it applied little. Where does the Bill give people who want to volunteer more spare time? The second biggest reason given by the survey was bureaucracy. Where does the Bill deal with bureaucracy? Other barriers to people coming forward to volunteer include work commitments; looking after children or the home; looking after someone elderly or ill. The hon. Gentleman will know, if he is really honest, that this is a Bill without a cause. Fear of litigation is a very small factor—I think only 1% in the most recent survey referred to that.

[Mr Hurd]

Can we just be clear that the position of the Labour party is that all is well with the 2006 Act, and that there is not a significant issue in the voluntary sector about the risk of litigation and the concern about managing that risk?

[Sadiq Khan]

If the hon. Gentleman will be patient, I will come on to what the Justice Secretary should have done and pray in aid experts in that regard.

As I said, volunteering is going up, not down. If the health and safety culture is stifling volunteering, perhaps the Justice Secretary can explain the increase in volunteering. As I have said, there is no evidence to support the problem that he describes. There is no great health and safety beast suffocating the life out of those doing good deeds, petrified into inaction at the prospect of having to fork out compensation after being sued. Even if there was, the Bill provides no real substantive solutions anyway.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I think that many of us are of the view—I am a little surprised that this is not in the Bill—that certain volunteers, particularly in cave and mountain rescue organisations, and even the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, are put in situations that are probably far too difficult and dangerous. In certain situations, for example when people seem to make a specialism of going on to mountains when they know there will be bad weather, the Government should be doing more to protect those volunteers.

[Sadiq Khan]

If the Bill was really about social action, responsibility and heroism, those sorts of measures would be in it, but clearly it is not.

Let me remind the House of the conclusions of the Government’s own inquiry, which the Justice Secretary referred to, but not fully. Lord Young of Graffham, in his 2010 report, concluded:

“The problem of the compensation culture prevalent in society today is, however, one of perception rather than reality.”

There we have it, from the Government’s mouth: it is a perception, not a reality. The report goes on to highlight:

“One of the great misconceptions, often perpetuated by the media, is that we can be liable for the consequences of any voluntary acts”.

The report then refers to advice given to people in the winter of 2009 about not clearing snow from the front of their houses in case someone slipped and sued them. The Lord Chief Justice said that he had never come across someone being sued in those circumstances, yet the Justice Secretary has wilfully reported that old chestnut in articles he has written before today. I am happy to give way if he would like to intervene and list the occasions since 2010 when such incidents have occurred. No? Well, there we have it. His silence is telling, as he knows there are no such cases.

If the Justice Secretary’s point was that the threat of litigation is putting people off clearing snow, the Bill will do nothing to address that. In fact, the MOJ’s own statistics show that the total number of money claims in civil courts has been following a downward trend in recent years, rather than going up. In any case, the Bill deals with cases that have already reached the courts, so nothing in it will reduce the prospect of being sued. It will not reduce, as he describes it, the “stress and strain” if someone is sued.

Instead of preparing this Bill—the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner asked this question—the Secretary of State’s energies, and those of his officials, would have been better spent rebutting some of the myths about negligence and health and safety. That would have been a better way of tackling the fear of litigation, given that the likelihood of a negligence claim is pretty small. In fact, that was the advice of Lord Dyson, the Master of the Rolls. In a speech entitled “Compensation culture: Fact or fantasy?”, he argued that the perception of a compensation culture

“is not however as grounded in reality as had been suggested.”

He also suggested:

“All of this may also require a substantive educative effort on the part of government, the courts and the legal profession to counter-act the media-created perception that we are in the grips of a compensation culture. It may also require greater public legal education.”

Perhaps that education should have begun with the Justice Secretary.

I have already welcomed the Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims to his new post and congratulated him on his promotion. I am sorry that he is not here to share the joys of the Bill with his line manager, because in his previous job at the Department for Work and Pensions he understood exactly the importance of exploding myths about health and safety. In January, in answer to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) on health and safety, he said that

‘it is very important that health and safety is taken seriously in the workplace and in public areas. Right across the Christmas period, I went public about the need to ensure that Christmas was not spoiled by stupid comments, and stupid local authorities saying, ‘We shouldn’t do this or that’—throw snowballs, or have Christmas trees in certain areas—‘because of health and safety.’ That is wrong, and it has nothing to do with health and safety; it is an insurance risk.’—[Official Report, 13 January 2014; Vol. 573, c. 579.]

I hope that although the Minister is absent today he will be able to import some of his common sense into the current MOJ team. After all, as drafted, this Bill will not help. The Government are seeking to legislate to deal with how we perceive risk, real or otherwise. If he were serious, the Justice Secretary would tackle the misconceptions about the risk of being sued, but that is a trickier task that he has chosen to duck.

In introducing this Bill, the Justice Secretary said a lot about how it will protect the responsible employer. That prompts this question: where are the dozens of examples of courts having had a case before them where an employer has done the right thing and an employee has not, and yet they have found for the employee? There are no examples of such cases. He talked about members of the emergency services not going to someone’s rescue in case they breach health and safety rules. Will he tell the House what representations he has received from the fire, ambulance, police and coastguard services in support of that contention? Silence again.

I would like to pick up an important legal point. The Bill seems to conflate health and safety and negligence cases. The former are usually strict liability and the latter are not. That confuses civil liability with criminal liability.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I think I know how the right hon. Gentleman will respond to this point, but, for clarity, I am going to put it anyway. There have undoubtedly been cases, have there not, where policemen have said, for example, that they were not prepared to pull an apparently drowned victim out of a pool for fear of not being suitably qualified to do so? Is he saying that some measure other than this Bill will try to prevent that in future? Such cases clearly do exist, as they are widely reported to a horrified public.

[Sadiq Khan]

I have great respect for the hon. Gentleman, but he was not in the Chamber when I referred to the Master of the Rolls. We need to make sure that employees who do not know the position are educated and told the position, and that those who are not properly trained are properly trained. Debating a three-clause Bill today, and even passing it in the next few months, will not make a jot of difference. We need to make sure that the public and those who work in the emergency services are better educated and know what obligations and duties are placed on them, without the risk and fear of litigation.

Let us be clear: this Bill is targeted at negligence and not at health and safety at all. When the Justice Secretary claims, as he does, that his Bill will

“finally slay much of the ‘elf and safety’…culture”,

he must be honest about the fact that he is being disingenuous, to say the least. If this Bill were really about health and safety, he would be telling the House about the conversations he has had with the Health and Safety Executive and its views on the necessity for such legislation. Again—I think for the seventh time—I will happily allow him to intervene on me to update the House on those conversations with the Health and Safety Executive. Silence again.

We will use the Committee stage of the Bill to scrutinise in more detail its ramifications, both intended and unintended, because it might end up having the opposite effect to that which the Justice Secretary wants. A single act or omission is all that is needed to be negligent. That act or omission might be so serious, causing injury, pain or even death, as to outweigh any amount of good behaviour. He likes talking about hypothetical situations, so what about this one? You are the parent of a child. Would you want them to go on a trip knowing that if they are injured owing to a fault on the part of the school, youth club or scouts, they will not get compensated? The Bill creates the impression that this is the Government’s intention. Or this one: the chairman of a local football team cuts corners when vetting volunteer coaches working with children in the belief that he is protected by the law because in providing coaching for children, he is, to quote clause 2,

“acting for the benefit of society”.

The ramifications of this Bill are that children risk being more exposed to risk. Is that the Government’s intention in introducing it?

If that is not the Government’s intention, this three-clause Bill will not make any difference to the current state of play, as the former Solicitor-General made clear in his intervention. When assessing negligence claims, courts already take into account whether somebody is doing something for the benefit of society, as is recognised by the impact assessment of the Ministry of Justice. That is why organisations have insurance. Although they may be defendants in a claim, they would not be financially liable and their insurer would pay out.

That leads me on to another point. It is interesting that the impact assessment states:

“Insurers and other defendants may gain from slightly reduced aggregate compensation paid and this may feed through to lower insurance premiums.”

However, there is no attempt whatsoever to quantify that, and nor is there any undertaking from insurance companies that it will be passed on to customers—all of which leaves us questioning whether any of that will actually happen in practice, or will insurance companies just end up with higher profits? We all know, by the way, that those companies have donated millions of pounds to the Conservative party’s coffers over recent years.

The House must also steel itself for the inevitable last-minute tabling of a slew of Government new clauses and amendments. The Justice Secretary has a very bad habit of doing that. Such proposals get a cursory amount of scrutiny at best, but they are designed to get the good media hit he so craves and to raise a cheer from his beleaguered Back Benchers. We are very alert to the possibility of new things being added to the Bill at later stages.

Short though today’s Second Reading debate will be, given the paucity of Government speakers, it would be helpful if the Justice Secretary could provide a number of reassurances. Will he reassure us that the Government have no intention of watering down the duty on businesses, particularly small firms, to take out employers’ liability insurance, and that there are no plans to make individual employees take out their own insurance as an alternative to employers’ liability insurance?

[Chris Grayling]

Given that the right hon. Gentleman is opposed to every aspect of what we are proposing, I am baffled that the serried ranks of Labour Bank Benchers do not plan to vote against the Bill.

[Sadiq Khan]

I appreciate that the Justice Secretary is demoralised because he has not been moved from the Justice Department. When the Prime Minister asked Cabinet members to volunteer Bills and the Justice Secretary put up his hand and said, “Please, sir, I’ll put forward a Bill,” he thought he would have moved on by the time it came to Second Reading, so I am sorry that he has to deal with this pathetic and embarrassing Bill. Given that it is the Justice Secretary’s Bill, we expected dozens and dozens of his MPs to be present saying what a wonderful Bill it is, but they are not piling up behind him to say so.

The Justice Secretary has claimed that years of work—that is what he said—have gone into this pathetic and embarrassing Bill. It confuses important legal concepts and it is not properly thought through, so it could have negative knock-on effects as a result. It lacks an evidence base and seeks to legislate on the back of myths. It will not do what the Justice Secretary claims it will. It is UKIP-friendly, but it is more like something out of “The Thick of It”. It does not seem to do anything that the current law—section 1 of the Compensation Act 2006 —does not already do.

Members should not just take my word for it. Today’s briefing by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, which was mentioned by the former Minister for Civil Society, who has now left the Chamber, says:

“NCVO does not expect this bill to significantly alter the current law, with similar provisions already made in the Compensation Act 2006.”

Therefore, the only people whom the Justice Secretary could pray in aid say that the Bill will not make a jot of difference. All three main aims of the Bill are covered by that existing legislation. In fact, the MOJ’s own impact assessment also notes that

“the courts are already very experienced in dealing with these cases”.

It is a sad indictment of this Government that this is the best they have to offer in the final year of this Parliament, when prisons are in crisis, probation is in meltdown and access to justice is under attack on a daily basis. If the Justice Secretary was told by the Prime Minister that he had to introduce a Bill in this Queen’s Speech, we would have thought that he might have chosen a better one. What about a victims’ law? He could have used this window to put the rights of victims and witnesses into primary legislation. Instead, we have the SARAH Bill—a turkey of a Bill, a vacuous Bill—which, without doubt, is the most embarrassing and pathetic Bill that the Minister of Justice has published since the Department was first formed.

[Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)]

I confess that I am no enthusiast for this Bill, but if I was ever to be persuaded to change my mind, the speech of the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) would go a long way to doing so. It was a rather snide and unnecessarily cheap speech, if I may say so, but it pains me to say that I largely agree with its thrust.

[Sadiq Khan]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Particularly bearing in mind where I think the former Solicitor-General is going in his speech, is it not the practice for someone who has made a speech to stay for at least the next two speeches to hear other people’s contributions?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Actually, it is in order normally to hear one. I do not know the circumstances, but I am sure the right hon. Gentleman has made his point. The Secretary of State waited fully until the end of the right hon. Gentleman’s speech. I am not sure whether he wanted to hear Sir Edward Garnier’s speech—that is not for me to decide—but the point has been made.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Garnier]

That was very interesting. I have absolutely no doubt that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State wanted to hear every word I am about to say, but he has other pressing public duties to attend to. No doubt, he will read the whole of this afternoon’s debate in the Official Report in due course.

One good reason for speaking in this debate is to give me an opportunity to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd) for his work as a Cabinet Office Minister, particularly on the voluntary sector. He worked extremely hard, with precious little thanks, and was content to do so, despite the fact that all he did achieved, sadly, very little public profile. At least on this occasion, we can thank him very much for all he did. I trust that it will not be long before he is back in government again.

As I said at the outset, I am not hugely enthusiastic about this particular piece of legislation. I am concerned that what the Secretary of State said does not reflect the long title, which states that it is a Bill:

“To make provision as to matters to which a court must have regard in determining a claim in negligence or breach of statutory duty.”

Most of what he said had to do with sending out messages. We all need to send out messages from time to time—sometimes to ask for help, and sometimes to ask people to pay attention to what we are trying to do. In so far as it went, his speech was no doubt well intended, but it did not, if I may say so, condescend to deal with the Bill as a potential piece of law. If we are to pass or make laws, they must be coherent. Although I entirely agree with all the sentiments that he uttered this afternoon about reducing the so-called health and safety culture, reducing the easy acceptance of the only answer to a problem being to sue and dissuading ambulance-chasing solicitors from doing this, that or the other, I regret to say that I do not agree that this particular Bill will achieve that.

I do not know how many people who are intent on bringing an action, if they are not lawyers themselves, think about pieces of legislation. Let us hope that I am wrong and my right hon. Friend is right, and that when the Bill is enacted, copies of it will be plastered all over doctors’ waiting rooms and other public places, so that no citizen will be tempted to bring a spurious claim.

I would be interested to hear how many High Court or county court actions would have been decided differently had the Bill been in force. It is perfectly true to say that the Compensation Act 2006 covers many of the areas of conjecture that are covered by the Bill. I am not persuaded that the Bill covers any new territory.

[Sadiq Khan]

The hon. and learned Gentleman is being very generous. I hope that my comments will be helpful. The impact assessment that accompanies the Bill states in paragraph 17:

“Both the possible reduction in case volumes and the size of any compensation payments are unknown, but are likely to be small.”

[Sir Edward Garnier]

That is, no doubt, what the impact assessment says. Whether that justifies the bringing into law of the Bill, I rather doubt.

I spoke about the Bill before having read it on the Thursday of the Queen’s Speech debate. I teased the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government rather rudely by inviting him to provide a definition of “heroic negligence”. He heroically tried to provide me with such a definition, but he did not do so. That is not surprising, because I am not entirely sure that there is such a thing.

I was interested in what my noble Friend Lord Faulks, the Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, said on 9 June in the debate on the Queen’s Speech in the other place. He said that the Bill will not change the existing overarching legal framework or leave victims without protection, but that it will provide reassurance and send a strong signal to the courts. To quote directly, he said:

“They will still need to look at whether a defendant met the appropriate standard of care in all the circumstances of the case.”—

I say, in parenthesis, that that is what they do already—

“Nor will it introduce blanket exemptions to civil liability. There is an important balance to be struck between encouraging participation in civil society and being mindful of the impact that careless or risky actions could have on the very people that the defendant was trying to help. The Bill is not about removing protection and leaving victims without proper recourse in those circumstances. However, it will give valuable and needed reassurance to a wide range of people and send a powerful signal that the courts will take full account of the context of a person’s actions when determining a negligence claim.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 June 2014; Vol. 754, c. 132.]

I do not think that anybody in either House knows more about the law of negligence than my noble Friend Lord Faulks, who has 40 years’ experience at the Bar dealing predominantly with cases involving negligence and public authorities, such as fire authorities. Reading between the lines of what he said—he will contradict me if I have got this wrong—he does not have a huge amount of enthusiasm for the Bill. However, I may have misread what he said.

The Bill is more like an early-day motion than a proper statute. I say that because, as the Secretary of State admitted, it is predominantly there to send out a message—a strong signal. As I have had many opportunities to say in my 22, 23 or 24 years in this House, we should legislate not to send out signals or messages, but to make good black-letter law, so that the courts know what the law is and can apply it, and so that the legal professions know what it is and can advise the public on it.

My concern is that the contents of the Bill have been within the common law and the ambit of the court’s appreciation for years and years. In 1954, in the case of Watt v. Hertfordshire County Council, Lord Justice Denning, as he then was, spoke about the balancing act performed by the court when people intervene to help in an emergency, which relates to clause 4. He said:

“It is well settled that in measuring due care one must balance the risk against the measures necessary to eliminate the risk. To that proposition there ought to be added this. One must balance the risk against the end to be achieved. If this accident had occurred in a commercial enterprise without any emergency there could be no doubt that the servant would succeed. But the commercial end to make profit is very different from the human end to save life or limb. The saving of life or limb justifies taking considerable risk, and I am glad to say there have never been wanting in this country men of courage ready to take those risks, notably in the Fire Service.”

What Lord Justice Denning said is as true now as it was in 1954, as I know from the emergency services in my own county of Leicestershire, be it the police, the ambulance service or the fire service. There are plenty of brave people who will risk their own life and limb to save others.

I rather agree what my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) said about the last words of clause 4, which refer to an action taken

“without regard to the person’s own safety or other interests.”

I suggest, and I think he agrees, that it is much more heroic to do something having had regard to one’s own safety or other interests, and to go on and do the brave thing—rescuing someone from a frozen lake, pulling them out of a burning building or whatever it might be—despite having thought about those interests. For goodness’ sake, if the Bill is to become law, the least we can do is to remove those last few words of clause 4. Even if it were difficult to work out in law what heroic negligence actually was, we would at least have made that clause a little better.

Nobody will be thanked, least of all a Government Back Bencher, for making a rude speech about a Government Bill, but from time to time, even on a hot day when I would rather be somewhere else, I find it necessary for this House to introduce a degree of common sense into a Bill before the other place gives it a thorough grilling. Far too often, the laws that we pass are the laws of the unintended consequence, and I have a horrible suspicion that if the Bill becomes an Act as it is currently drafted, it will be the subject of derision and confusion, or that even if that does not happen, it will fall into disuse.

I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to take my remarks in the spirit in which they are intended. I really do share with him and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State the aims that the latter set out quite a few times— to prevent the abuse of the health and safety culture, to reduce spurious litigation and claims and so on. If I may say so, though, passing a Bill that has a hideous resemblance to an early-day motion rather than a proper Act of Parliament is not the way to do it.

I hope that the Bill will not be the subject of a Division this evening, because I cannot support it. If the Opposition seek a Division I will not join them in the lobby, because I found the manner in which the right hon. Member for Tooting made his speech unattractive, but that is a matter for him. We need to take the Bill away and give it a thorough scrubbing over the summer holidays.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Vara]

The hon. Gentleman says I have given two examples. That is two more than the number of times he has repeated the same question, over and over again. I am sorry that he does not like the answer, but he will have to live with it.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) was quite candid in his comments. I have to say that while I respect his distinguished career in the law and his legal brain power, on this issue I will respectfully disagree with him. What we are trying to do is consolidate the measures elsewhere in the statute book in one Bill. Also, as my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary made clear, we are seeking to send out a powerful message to public: that when they do the right thing, the law will take them into account.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who spoke in support of the Bill. As he rightly put it, we should judge the Bill by its content, not by the number of clauses. He asked whether it would be extended to Northern Ireland. That is a matter for the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly, as it is a devolved matter, but I will certainly be following with interest to see what progress is made by the Northern Ireland Assembly. It is comforting that he has put on the record his support for the measure.

We need to be clear that there is nothing in the Bill to stop an employee bringing a negligence claim against an employer. [Interruption.] Clearly the paymasters of the Labour party, the trade unions, have been lobbying it hard, as was abundantly clear from the way Labour Members spoke about their friends in the trade unions. The Bill is not designed to reduce standards of health and safety in the workplace or to leave workers without a remedy where they have been injured by the negligent actions of an irresponsible employer. It will, however, provide valuable reassurance to employers who have taken a responsible approach to safety, but end up in court when, for example, an employee suffers an injury that simply could not have been foreseen by any reasonable person. The Bill will send the powerful message that the courts will always consider the employer’s general approach to safety in the course of the activity in question before reaching a decision on liability.

The courts will, of course, need to consider in every case whether someone was acting for the benefit of society or adopting a generally responsible approach to the safety of others in the course of a particular activity. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) chunters away from a sedentary position. All I will say to him is “Where are your Back Benchers?”

[Sadiq Khan]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mr Vara]

I will give way, but I should like the right hon. Gentleman to answer the question that I have just put to him. Where are his Back Benchers?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

I am intervening to ask whether the Minister can tell us the difference between the position created by the Bill and the position under the Compensation Act 2006. It is a simple question: what is the difference?

[Mr Vara]

The right hon. Gentleman clearly was not listening. He was concentrating so hard on preparing his question that he completely ignored the question that I had asked. [Interruption.]