Compensation Bill vilified

Clause 1 of the Compensation Bill, which purports to clarify the law of negligence, continues to attract universal condemnation. The All Party Parliamentary Group on the Insurance and Financial Services has called on the Government to drop the clause on the grounds that it ‘serves little useful purpose’. Kerry Renouf of Berrymans Lace Mawer described the section as ‘probably the most useless piece of legislation that has ever been produced’, Joshua Rosenberg in the Telegraph wrote that the clause was ‘designed entirely to mislead’, while the APIL president, Allan Gore QC, said, ‘Attempts to summarise 75 years of common law in legislation were likely to cause uncertainty leading to unwanted and protracted legal argument’ and observed that ‘no advice was obtained from the Law Commission’. The remainder of the Bill has not emerged unscathed, with the shadow Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, saying that the Bill ‘is not worth a pin’ and Nick Starring of the ABI observed that the Bill fails to ‘address the fundamental issues around compensation’.