It is an honour and a pleasure to have the opportunity to present this report to Parliament today. It is on the very important subject of product liability on which the European Community first introduced legislation as long ago as 1985 in the form of a directive. This was transposed in a somewhat leisurely way, and in some cases we might even say in a shockingly slow way, by Member States. So it is only fairly recently that there has been across the Union experience of the working of the product liability regime, which of course is not absolutely uniform in any event across the countries, because there are areas where different views may be taken consistent with the directive. This legislation substitutes distributive justice, in a sense, for corrective justice in this very important area of the law of civil liability. The idea is that if a defective product is sold and used and injures in any way a consumer, the consumer should be entitled to compensation without proof of fault on the producer’s part, merely proof of causation of the damage by the defective product. This is a very good idea. It helps to spread the risks of injury widely and ensure compensation. Of course, it does not in itself ensure product safety. That is better done by other regimes regulating various industries, and we have a good regulatory regime in most of our industries in the European Union now. Moreover, it should not be thought that this is the only basis upon which people who are injured can be helped. We have other systems of distributive justice on this side of the Atlantic, not paralleled in, for example, the United States of America, which has a different but somewhat tougher product liability law than we have. There, however, it is a kind of forensic lottery, as academics have called it, because many people who are injured get nothing at all and some people who are injured get enormous damages. It is generally, and rightly, thought that plaintiffs’ lawyers are the people who do best out of the deal. We should stick to our own view on social security as the main basis for help, but then have this product liability regime as well. The Green Paper raised the question of whether this scheme should be extended and whether some changes should be made. This was in response to debates in Parliament last year, which led to the amendment of the directive to include primary agricultural products. It seems to me that the Green Paper, although it has started the debate well, will not finish it completely. It gave a useful summary of the way the law has developed and been applied, and then asked a series of questions of interested parties and required replies in by the end of November last year. That is a good way of finding out if there are alarming and urgent matters needing swift action. It is a bad way of producing a thorough and scientific study of the impact of a body of law on civil society and on life in our Union. We need more and deeper study for that purpose. In the meantime we could take this view, and my report suggests that we take this view: unless the evidence produced shows a strong factually-based need for early change, we should have further and deeper reflection on the matter, and we should have a debate that ranges wider than the debate triggered by the Green Paper itself. There is a great deal of very interesting work of a scholarly and scientific kind and there could be more if it was known that this was properly under consideration. I know that this approach has disappointed some colleagues, particularly those who raised the debate last year, and it has been suggested that the Parliament would simply walk away from important issues if we left it at that. I would not myself like to leave it at that. I have therefore suggested some compromise amendments which suggest that there must be a further and deeper dialogue about this which pays close attention to the points which have been raised without prejudging what is the right answer to them. I do not think it should be prejudged. I would not myself like to be a party to imposing on Europe the “tort tax” under which Americans have made themselves suffer. So I suggest that we urge the Commission to hold a longer and deeper dialogue about this; not to precipitate action but to measured consideration. We have a good law and the saying “if a thing ain’t broken, don’t fix it; but do not be complacent about it either” applies here.

Political group: Verts-ALE