Clause 1 - Interpretation
Promotion of Volunteering Bill
9:30 am
Ms Fiona Mactaggart (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Race Equality, Community Policy and Civil Renewal), Home Office; Slough, Labour)
It is a pleasure to be chaired by you, Mr. Taylor, and I am confident that it will continue to be.
As I explained, under paragraph (b), the term ''volunteer'' would be extended to a farmer or other landowner who may permit his land to be used for voluntary or educational activity. My concern is that that would allow such a person to permit their land to be used for such activity, knowing that the land was dangerous for whatever reason, but to seek exemption
from liability in the event of an accident caused directly by their negligence.
The Bill and its promoter, with whom I have had productive conversations to try to find a way of solving the problem that the Bill seeks to address, have a difficulty. We must recognise that the Government have not used their usual powerful panoply of tricks—it is quite wrong of me to call them that; they are, rather, the resources at the Government's disposal—to destroy the Bill at an early stage, because we recognise that it seeks to address a genuine concern. Indeed, we hoped to be able to use it to deal with that concern, but our efforts were frustrated by the fact that the more we investigated the issue, the more we believed that it risked making things worse and did not solve the problem that we are all trying to solve. That is why we are here in Committee and I have not had the joy of speaking at great length on a Friday morning, which I am quite capable of doing and have done before.
The clause is an example of the temptation to try to fix a whole load of things that are perceived to be problems, but not necessarily in a way that will work. The hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) cited the case of the farmer who alerted him and his sons to the fact that a particular part of his land that is a vehicle dump could pose a risk and should be avoided. The problem with the clause, however, is that it would actually allow a farmer or another landowner not to provide such information at all. Indeed, landowners who allowed their land to be used in return for a fee could seek the resource—