Clause 2 - Statements of Inherent Risk
Promotion of Volunteering Bill
10:30 am
Ms Fiona Mactaggart (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Race Equality, Community Policy and Civil Renewal), Home Office; Slough, Labour)
Yes, I will try to do that. I have spent a lot of time looking at what is actually happening. All Committee members have spoken as if the compensation culture is leading to a substantial increase in the number of claims made, the number of claims litigated and the number of claims settled out of court. Those are the sort of assumptions on which the debate has proceeded. However, figures provided by the compensation recovery unit, which has to have figures on every claim made because it deals with recovery in terms of benefits and so forth, show that claims declined by 9.5 per cent. in 2004 and that public liability incidents, which is what this sort of claim relates to, were down by 16.7 per cent., which means that there were 20,000 fewer claims.