Reforming Civil Justice

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I think that people will think twice, as it were. At the moment, they are lured into making a claim by an advertisement on the back of a bus or in some local office. There are many people with perfectly legitimate personal injuries claims and the method I would wish them to pursue is to go to a solicitor who will consider the reasonable prospects of success and take it on on a no win, no fee basis—on the sort of terms that were always envisaged when we introduced the system into this country in the 1990s. People will have to think more carefully; there will be fewer purely speculative actions; and there will be fewer actions brought in the hope that the size of the legal costs is so great that the other side might be bullied into making an offer of settlement, regardless of their chance of success. I hope, however, that legitimate claims will prosper under a no win, no fee system, which is much closer to the lower-cost systems that other jurisdictions operate.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

Thanks to the blame culture that developed under the last Government, one school in my constituency deemed it necessary to concrete over a very shallow paddling pool, in case a child had an accident and the school were sued. Another school considered cutting down all its trees in case children were to fall out of them, injuring themselves so that the school might be sued. I hope today’s statement will be the start of a fresh approach to this compensation culture.

[Mr Clarke]

I feel strongly, as does my hon. Friend, that we have an unacceptable compensation culture in this country. Like him, I notice it in my daily life. I think that doctors, teachers, policemen and most professional people are constantly concerned about the possible risk of litigation when they do perfectly ordinary things in the course of their daily lives. I dare say that the kind of submissions coming to Ministers are, in comparison with when I first received them, now so full of concerns about judicial review, the Human Rights Act and other legal constraints on what can be done that we are getting further and further away from common sense whereby people can exercise their judgment and, of course, be accountable to the law when they are at risk of breaking it—but only when they are at risk of breaking sensible law and might face litigation at reasonable cost.