House of Commons
Friday 5 March 2004
The House met at half-past Nine o'clock
PRAYERS
The Chairman of Ways and Means took the Chair as Deputy Speaker, pursuant to the Standing Order.
[Sir Alan Haselhurst in the Chair]
Orders of the Day
Promotion of Volunteering Bill
Order for Second Reading read.
9.33 am
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I am grateful for this opportunity to introduce my Bill to promote and defend volunteering and, especially, those forms of volunteering that bring sport and adventure training to our communities. I must thank all the organisations that have helped to prepare the Bill. In particular, I thank the Central Council of Physical Recreation, which represents most of the country's national sporting organisations; SkillsActive, the sector skills council for active leisure and learning; and the Campaign for Adventure, which under the patronage of the Duke of Edinburgh brings together all the major outward bound organisations, such as the Youth Hostels Association, the YMCA, the girl guides and so on. I must also thank two lawyers—Michael Harbottle and Roy Amlot QC—as well as Mr. Harrison of the Clerks Department for their help in preparing the Bill.
I am grateful to the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who I am pleased to see in her place, and to the Secretaries of State for Education and Skills and for Culture, Media and Sport for giving up their time to see delegations. I am particularly grateful to the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait), who I am delighted to see in her place, and to a number of colleagues on both sides of the House who have come to support the Bill.
Ten million people volunteer each week, and a staggering 22 million each year. By far the largest single category of volunteers—more than a quarter of the total according to a survey quoted by the Library—are in the sport and adventure training areas. Sport England has estimated that the value of volunteering to sport is an unbelievable £14 billion a year in equivalent wages. Some volunteer through sporting clubs or other voluntary bodies, some through schools and some through the voluntary arms of businesses. But of the 26 countries in the developed world, Britain is the third worst for obesity. A quarter of our population are now seriously overweight. Worst of all, a third of British
youngsters between the ages of two and 15 are overweight and one in six is clinically obese. What has gone wrong?The media have recently carried many stories of schools abandoning school trips because of the fear of litigation. I saw a couple of days ago that one school has even abandoned its pancake race.
Mr. John Burnett (Torridge and West Devon) (LD): I am a strong supporter of the Bill and I shall make that clear if I catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I think that that particular case occurred in my constituency. Steps were taken to remedy the problem, and although it took an enormous amount of trouble, it was eventually overcome.
Mr. Brazier: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I am glad to hear that the problems were overcome, and I am also pleased that he is one of the co-sponsors of the Bill.
One of the teaching unions, the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, recently advised its members not to take children on school trips at all. It said:
- "In an increasingly litigious society which no longer appears to accept the concept of a genuine accident, our first responsibility must be to protect our members' interests."
In December, Sport England issued a joint press release with the Central Council of Physical Recreation pointing to the threats to volunteering in sport. It said:
- "Sport will die without volunteers and the clubs in which they work . . . the research revealed that sports volunteers are coming under increasing pressure. Threats to people taking up volunteering . . . include"—
- "Risk, fear and blame and the threat of litigation . . . Increasing bureaucracy".
Mr. Brazier: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but I am quoting Sport England, which is a Government quango, and the Central Council of Physical Recreation, which is the body that brings together all the major sporting organisations from the Football Association to the Rugby Football Union—270 in all, I believe. I have referred to the joint survey that they have carried out of those involved in the largest single category of volunteering—sport and adventure training. I fully accept that many other worthwhile forms of volunteering—I am wearing a Marie Curie Foundation emblem in my buttonhole—may have different concerns. However, I have mentioned the two main concerns in this crucial sector.
Mr. Love: I hope to go into this issue in slightly more detail later this morning, but I refer the hon. Gentleman
to the study carried out by the national survey of volunteering in 1997 and to a second survey on volunteering management. They are the two most comprehensive studies that have been undertaken and neither of them highlights the issues that he has outlined as of primary concern to the volunteering movement.
Mr. Brazier: I understand that point and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but all the legal cases to which I shall refer occurred after 1997. The study to which I am referring took place only three months ago.
Mr. Ian Taylor (Esher and Walton) (Con): I am fascinated by my hon. Friend's speech, but surely everything in our constituencies goes against the conclusions of the report that he cites.
Mr. Brazier: I entirely sympathise with my hon. Friend, and I am grateful to him for co-sponsoring the Bill, but I think I will develop my case. Priorities have changed a lot since 1997, and although the Bill is a specific attempt to address the concerns of those in the sport and adventure training volunteering sector, several other groups that I shall talk about also support it.
I am a strong supporter of safety. Having been responsible for a fatal accident on the roads, albeit in a totally different context, I know only too well what the horrible consequences of that for an individual and his family can be. None the less, we do not make the world a safer place with the kind of civil litigation that is undermining sport and adventure training for young people and increasingly targeting volunteers. We have some of the safest sport and adventure training in the world. I know parachuting quite well, and I am constantly struck by how much safer our parachuting is than that in north America and continental Europe.
Perversely, by allowing the persecution of volunteers through litigation, we are making life far more dangerous. For every sporting tragedy, there are now dozens—perhaps hundreds—of health tragedies as young people face illnesses and disfigurements that used to be mostly of only old age. They range from obesity to heart disease, and sometimes lead to people losing their lives.
The problem goes well beyond immediate physical health. Sport and adventure training are vital for producing leadership, developing the understanding of risk taking and training people in the ability to cope with the dangerous and unexpected, which can occur in many contexts in life. A failure by society to provide young people with healthy, structured and safe outlets for their energies and enthusiasms will only lead, in many cases, to their finding their own outlets. At best, those will be a lot less safe, and at worst they will end in criminal activity.
I have seen the work of organisations such as the Army Cadet Force in the east end of London, and I took youngsters from deprived areas in the north of England on Operation Raleigh—Colonel John Blashford-Snell's scheme. With both, I was impressed beyond belief by the character-building opportunities. Sport and adventure
training develops the best in kids on the margins of society—especially, but not exclusively, those children—and saves some from terrible fates. I am extremely impressed by the work of youth clubs in my constituency. Indeed, Whitstable yacht and rugby clubs have done a great deal for my sons.At a conference three years ago, Prince Philip commented:
- "Modern society is being over-protective. We should not be excluded from adventure and risk-taking by a nanny state. There is more danger in not exposing people to risks than exposing them. The downside for society is far greater if it's totally safe than if it has risk."
In the recent excellent report produced by the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson)—I am delighted to see him in the Chamber—he comments:
- "Play cannot be made risk free. Learning to judge risk is one of the benefits children get from play . . . The blame culture, increasing litigation and consequence rises in the cost of insuring playgrounds is making life more expensive and difficult for councils and voluntary organisations alike . . . Parliament may need to give special statutory protection to play organisations"—
My youngest son fractured his wrist while climbing off a climbing frame in his school playground last year. Although I had to reprove him for being caught on the same frame, plaster cast and all, only hours after leaving hospital—little sod—I admired his spirit and certainly do not want to sue anyone. [Interruption.] I am sorry if I used an unparliamentary expression, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
I agree entirely with the right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras. We have to accept that volunteers who give up long hours of their time and take on the burden of responsibility must enjoy a degree of protection from persecution through civil litigation in the courts when things go wrong.
Let me give some examples. Six years ago, a 17-year-old boy on a school trip had to be twice reproved for dangerously skiing off-piste by the teachers from Woodbridge school who were giving up their time to escort him. He finally had a serious accident and broke his back. His parents sued the school and won the case in the lower courts, on the grounds that the young man should have been thrown off the slopes for behaving foolishly, even through the accident occurred while he was skiing on-piste. It took five years before the Court of Appeal finally overturned the judgment last year. One can only imagine what the teachers who gave their time to organise the trip must have gone through: they saw the horrible accident, had to cope with it and, finally, went through five years of litigious hell.
One case has been highlighted by Roy Amlot QC, an adviser to Campaign for Adventure, as especially threatening to adventure training, although it is the only case that I shall mention today that did not involve a volunteer. A judge found negligence against a mountaineering instructor, despite accepting the facts of the case, on the grounds that he, the judge, disagreed with the mountaineering instructor's judgment of the best way to handle a landslip.
Let me now turn to the world of rugby. Two recent cases that were both brought against individual volunteer referees have gone all way to the Court of Appeal and both have been upheld. The first case, Smoldon v. Whitworth, caused a terrific shudder to go through the rugby world as it was the first time that a negligence claim had been upheld after a tragic accident. Lack of time prevents me from going into the detail of the case, but aggravating circumstances were involved beyond a simple breach of the rules by the referee, including the fact that the captain of the team on which the young man who was seriously and permanently crippled had played complained to the referee about his failure to uphold the new rule on scrums before the accident took place. The Court of Appeal carefully phrased its judgment in such a confined fashion as to make it clear that it was deliberately heading off opening the floodgates for further actions that would undermine the game.
The second case, Vowles v. Evans and another, was heard by the Court of Appeal last year. Far from being an extreme case, it simply turned on whether the referee was right to allow someone inexperienced to act as a substitute. The case lowered the bar. As the QC for the defence argued persuasively, frankly it opens the door to any number of cases against referees who make honest mistakes that lead to serious consequences. There will be serious injuries in a rough game from time to time.
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