Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Bill

Debate between Sadiq Khan and Susan Elan Jones

Monday 21st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.