| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
7.28 pm
Mr. Streeter: This has been an important debate on an important Bill, and every hon. Member who has spoken has made a valuable contribution. I should like to deal quickly with some of the important points that were raised.
I can assure the hon. Member for Brent, South (Mr. Boateng) that we will be the Government who introduce these reforms over the next few years. That is why we are taking great care to get them right and to resource them properly.
On the increase in fees, which was raised by several Opposition Members, I wish to make four concise points. First, people on legal aid will continue to have their court fees paid for by the Legal Aid Board. Secondly, those on income support will of course have the benefit of a minimal fee. Thirdly, as we all know--there are quite a few practising barristers in the Chamber tonight--court fees are a tiny fraction of lawyers' hourly rates.
Fourthly, unless the Labour party can commit itself to reversing the increase in civil court fees in the unlikely event of its forming a Government, it must accept that it is open to the charge of hypocrisy and a total lack of credibility. Reversing these increases--which have already been introduced, with effect from 15 January--will cost the taxpayer £50 million. Unless the hon. Member for Brent, South can say that Labour, in the unlikely event of its forming the next Government, would reverse that increase, he had better keep his counsel on that subject.
I can reassure the House that there will be sufficient resourcing for these important reforms. The current budget for computers in the county court service is in the region of £4 million. The budget for 1997-98 is about £5.5 million. We shall ensure that the best possible use is made of modern technology.
The current training budget for the Judicial Studies Board is £2.6 million. It is planned to increase to £3 million in 1997-98. In addition, conference facilities costing more than £500,000 are in the process of being refurbished to enable much more streamlined, up-to-date training to take place. Those are the major costs of the reforms, and they have been specifically provided for.
There will be sufficient staffing, and staff will be adequately trained. The budget will be adequate for that, and no doubt we can return to these matters in Committee. As the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson) said, it is expected that there will be significant medium and long-term savings as the reforms are implemented over the years.
We are actively considering piloting. The rules will enable us to take the power to do that. As a Government, we believe in piloting, which we are using in the case of many of our legal aid reforms.
Personal injury law was mentioned. Lord Woolf is considering that issue, which was also raised by the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers.
30 Jan 1997 : Column 566
Of course we will take the view of the consumer into account. Provision has been made on both the rule committee and the Civil Justice Council for the voice of the consumer to be heard.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) made an important speech. I thank him for his welcome for the reforms and for his helpful comments. True to his personal style, he made a very analytical assessment of the Bill and raised several detailed and important points. I hope that it will be in order if I write to give him the answers to those important points. He may be fortunate enough to serve on the Committee that will scrutinise the Bill and to make some of these points again.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Swansea, East, who rightly paid a warm tribute to Lord Woolf and agreed that it was important that the Bill was passed in this Parliament. He also made an important mention of alternative dispute resolution. I thoroughly agree that the importance of ADR has yet to be fully recognised. I thank him for his warm support for our reforms.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Sir I. Lawrence) made a helpful and important speech. He exposed Labour's new idea of a windbag tax, which could raise an awful lot of money from one or two Opposition Members. [Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."] I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for his warm support for these justified reforms.
The hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. Carlile) spoke in support of the reforms, drawing on his many years of experience at the Bar. He accurately described people's concerns about going to law and the costs risk to litigate small amounts. I am grateful for his kind comments about Lord Woolf. He expressed his anxiety about the number of Welsh boundary disputes, and I can confirm that the English rugby team will cross the Welsh line often at Cardiff Arms park in a few weeks' time. He recognised the important role played by county courts, especially in rural areas.
The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Ms Walley) made an important contribution. She is right to say that this issue is not only for lawyers, but for everyone, because it concerns justice; but she is not right to say that we have reviewed these reforms in isolation. We regard them as part of a twin-track approach with our legal aid reforms. Lord Woolf paid tribute to the way in which we have taken both sets of reforms forward together.
I am afraid that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North fell into the trap of claiming that there was not enough money, that the increase in court fees was wrong and that our reforms on legal aid were penny-pinching. Unless the Labour party can say that it would put more money in--in the unlikely event of winning the next general election--it has no credibility in raising such points.
Finally, the hon. Member for Brent, South raised new points in his extended winding-up speech. I will respond to him on the subject of district judges in due course. He is right that reading time has been made available for judges in our reforms. We have 18 months to get the detail right. Our commitment is to do so.
The Bill wages war on delay, excessive cost and bureaucracy. It will make access to justice quicker, simpler and cheaper. It will take the British justice system into the 21st century, and I commend it to the House.
30 Jan 1997 : Column 567
Question put and agreed to.
Bill read a Second time, and committed to a Standing Committee, pursuant to Standing Order No. 61 (Committal of Bills).
Queen's recommendation having been signified--
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 50A(1)(a),
Question agreed to.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Morris):
With permission, I shall put together the motions relating to delegated legislation.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 101(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Coe.]
Mr. Michael Alison (Selby):
I am glad to have the opportunity to raise on the Adjournment an issue which is causing anxiety and detriment to constituents of mine in the Selby district of North Yorkshire. The issue relates to the costs and possibilities of insurance cover for houses and householders whose property is affected by coal mining subsidence. The Selby district is particularly susceptible to the difficulties that I shall outline, because our local complex of mine workings is one of the largest and most modern in Britain, if not in Europe, extracting vast quantities of coal day and night under a huge local coalfield area, extending to scores of square miles.
More widely, coal mining subsidence, for all the recent diversification of our energy base, continues to be a huge and costly problem. At the end of October 1994, a Department of Trade and Industry press notice stated that British coal had settled 7,594 claims for subsidence that year, about one third of them in Yorkshire, at a cost of nearly £40 million.
That press notice, incidentally, was issued in the context of the introduction and appointment by the Government of an independent subsidence adviser, specifically to help protect the rights of those affected by coal mining subsidence. That initiative was as desirable as it was commendable, and the office of the subsidence adviser is now firmly established in Nottingham.
It is against that background that I want to draw the attention of my hon. Friend the Minister to a problem which the subsidence adviser has precisely pinpointed. Following a trawl which his office has made of several insurance companies, he wrote on 15 March 1995 to a firm of surveyors in Yorkshire who have been professionally retained by some of my constituents:
I remind my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State that, in an area of active coal mining such as the Selby coalfield, a period of suspended animation, so to speak, may apply between a phase of underground working, resulting in structural damage to property, and the Coal Authority's willingness to repair that property. Sometimes the repair work must wait for up to three years--even longer, in some cases--to make sure that the subsidence has settled and is complete, and thus to avoid abortive reinstatement.
30 Jan 1997 : Column 569
That is the background against which some of the worst problems arise for those seeking insurance cover. The three essential problems that they face relate, first, to the fact that they cannot take advantage of the many offers of cheaper insurance. That applies especially to householders whose insurance was, until recently, controlled by mortgage companies.
Secondly, there are the problems of those who are trying to buy or sell property in coal-mining areas, arising, for example, from demands by insurance companies for full and costly structural surveys before cover is offered. Thirdly, where insurance cover is to be continued in a sale, there are instances of very large premium increases, which can often abort a sale.
Let me tell my hon. Friend the result of trawls by constituents of mine, and others in Yorkshire, in their efforts to shop around for insurance cover. Churchill Insurance, Zurich Municipal, Ecclesiastical Insurance, Cornhill Direct, Prudential, General Accident, Avon Insurance, Norwich Union and Commercial Union have all stated in one way or another, categorically or more cautiously, that they would not be able to offer new insurance cover in the typical circumstances likely to arise in the Yorkshire mining area.
General Accident, for example, wrote:
30 Jan 1997 : Column 570
The body concerned had a most promising title: it was called the Subsidence Claims Advisory Bureau, and it referred in its prospectus to an insurance scheme known as Coal Sure Household Insurance, with a mouth-watering subtitle that read:
Such immovable resistance led me to write to the subsidence adviser, Mr. Webb, at the end of last summer. I received from him a letter that included the following passage:
I hope that my hon. Friend will agree that the situation is far from satisfactory. My constituents in North Yorkshire--and possibly others elsewhere--are suffering real detriment from the current state of affairs. One of my constituents, for example, who is paying an annual premium of £427 on her property in Selby to Royal Insurance, had an offer from General Accident for identical cover for £263. The offer from General Accident was withdrawn immediately, however, when my constituent disclosed that her house was in an active coal-mining area, and had suffered subsidence damage.
I think that my hon. Friend will be as surprised as I am by the negative approach that the insurance industry has adopted towards subsidence problems, precisely because the Government have an excellent record in underwriting damage with public funds. There is no rationale in the insurance industry jibbing at providing underwriting cover for properties in coal mining areas,
30 Jan 1997 : Column 571
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Civil Procedure Bill [Lords], it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of--
(a) any administrative expenses incurred by the Lord Chancellor in consequence of the Act, and
(b) any sums required by the Lord Chancellor for reimbursing expenses of members of the Civil Justice Council or the Civil Procedure Rule Committee.--[Mr. Streeter.]
That the draft Professions Supplementary to Medicine (Prosthetists and Orthotists Board) Order of Council 1997, which was laid before this House on 13th January, be approved.
That the Sheffield Development Corporation (Area and Constitution) Order 1997, dated 6th January 1997, a copy of which was laid before this House on 14th January, be approved.
That the Value Added Tax (Registered Social Landlords) (No. 2) Order 1997 (S.I., 1997, No. 51), dated 14th January 1997, a copy of which was laid before this House on 15th January, be approved.--[Mr. Coe.]
Question agreed to.
7.35 pm
"The insurance companies themselves have confirmed that they are more than willing to effect new insurance cover to properties in known coal mining areas provided that the property in question has no history of subsidence damage. None of the companies I have spoken to will effect new cover on a property with a history of subsidence damage, whatever the cause of the subsidence."
The refusal of new cover that the subsidence adviser pinpointed is the experience of a number of my constituents in the Selby district and more widely in North Yorkshire, who have approached many insurance companies about household insurance cover. The refusal of new cover is the tip of an iceberg of financial and other detriment, which goes far wider than the narrow problems of structural damage or defects that the Coal Mining Subsidence Act 1991 was designed to tackle.
"However, if a property has suffered from subsidence damage for which repairs either have, or have not been carried out, proposers are advised to remain with their existing insurers. . . If the subsidence problem is on-going it is less likely that we will be able to accommodate the business."
Prudential wrote:
"Any building which is to be insured by Prudential must be in a good state of repair before it can be accepted. We would not be prepared to accept a building damaged by coal mining subsidence that had not been repaired as the property would be susceptible to damage from other causes."
Britannic Assurance wrote:
"We would not be willing to accept as new business a property which is currently showing signs of structural problems or is adjoining a property that has recently suffered such damage."
When, in late 1995, I wrote to my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry about the problem, he actively entered the lists to see whether something could be done to improve matters. He constructively called a ministerial meeting with the relevant officers of the Association of British Insurers--ABI--and after that meeting, early in 1996, he wrote to me expressing the view that the essential difficulty was
"the information gap which can sometimes exist between insurance companies' head offices and local branches; and between insurance companies and brokers. Some brokers and local branches appear not to be sufficiently aware of the distinction between coal mining subsidence, where there is a statutory compensation scheme, and other types of subsidence where there is not.
My constituents followed the advice given by my hon. Friend, but I am sorry to say that it has not helped. Approaches to head offices proved as abortive as approaches to local agents. Indeed, one of my constituents had a letter from a senior officer of the
Turning to the situation of your constituent, I would suggest that she tries to contact insurance companies' head offices rather than brokers. Should she experience difficulties with the first contact point in any particular company or companies, she should, as suggested previously, enlist the help of the ABI in getting her through to more senior staff."
"At last a chance to obtain full Building Insurance cover on property that has previously suffered from mining subsidence."
My constituents thought, on receiving that advice from the ABI, which directed them to that specialist advisory bureau, that they had at last run their quarry to earth, as it were. They immediately got in touch with the firm of brokers, Messrs. G. W. Bishop Ltd., of Ashford, Kent, which was associated with the Coal Sure scheme. One can imagine their surprise and dismay, however, when they received a letter from Bishop Ltd. stating, in respect of properties that have suffered coal-mining subsidence:
"Cover for properties which have suffered from this type of damage is very difficult to obtain. In our experience, no company will offer subsidence cover for a property which has previously suffered any kind of movement."
Those exchanges clearly showed, and currently show, that departmental optimism in the Department of Trade and Industry, and sanguine and soothing advice from the ABI, have all foundered on the hard rock of resistance by the great mass of insurance companies to take on new household insurance business in active coal-mining areas.
"From the general response which I have received from the ABI, it is clear that the specific reply given by Churchill to (your constituent) is in accordance with the criteria which are being applied by the whole insurance industry. Those criteria are:--
The subsidence adviser rightly went on to describe the situation as "far from satisfactory."
1) Companies are not prepared to insure subsidence damaged properties as new business; and,
2) existing insurers will continue cover on subsidence damaged property, and this extends to new owners where the property changes hands, provided that cover has not been allowed to lapse."
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |