Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

May I first declare a personal interest, over and above being a member of the Bar? Health and safety at work has been my specialist field of practice for some years, and as it remains the only area in which I really practise at the Bar, the Bill has a direct professional relevance to me. I have no doubt at all that the Government’s intentions are commendable. From my experience of practising in the field, and especially of prosecuting for the Health and Safety Executive, which I did quite a lot before entering the House in the 1990s, I have no doubt about the gravity of several of the offences with which I dealt, and the poor reflection that those cases revealed of, especially, the operation of public companies and corporations and others. I am also aware of the anguish caused by death in any setting, and certainly by the unnecessary deaths caused by industrial accidents or by the activities of someone carrying out an undertaking. I echo the Home Secretary’s remarks about those who have campaigned to determine whether improvements to the law could be made. I am also of the view that there is scope for change and improvement. As the Bill goes through Parliament, Conservative Members will certainly do what we can to co-operate with the Government to determine the aspects on which improvements can be made. I shall touch on one or two of those as I proceed with my remarks, and I look forward to considering the Bill in Committee, because we have the capacity to produce something of value. The problem that the Government have faced with the Bill—I hope that I am not being too unkind to the Home Secretary when I say that it was reflected in the slight hesitancy of some of his remarks—is that, as so often happens, they are caught between a rock and a hard place. The Government wish to improve our body of legislation, which would be of value, but at the same time they have very properly not been prepared to be pushed or bulldozed by those who want the introduction of draconian legislation, especially in terms of penalties on individuals, that would go outside the scope of our normal principles of law. I entirely agree with the Home Secretary that we must deal with corporate manslaughter. The only fair way in which to deal with manslaughter allegations against individuals, with custodial sentences being imposed if transgression is shown, is under the existing framework of the manslaughter law. If we were to start departing from that—some have suggested that we should—it would quickly become apparent that people would be treated unjustly. It should not be the role of Parliament to do that, however tempting it might sometimes be. Having taken that decision and gone on to examine the problem of fixing corporations with allegations of manslaughter, which is inherent, and of which we know from the case of the Herald of Free Enterprise, which the Home Secretary and others cited, it seems that the Government have tried very hard to keep the notion of corporate manslaughter and produce a new framework that will enable corporations to be convicted. However, they face the problem of having ended up with a Bill about which it is at least legitimate to raise the question: what does it add to our existing laws in practical terms? I shall concentrate especially on that point, but before I do so, I want to consider several of the Bill’s details and flag up for the Home Secretary some areas at which we will need to look carefully. The Home Secretary made it clear that the Bill is aimed at corporations. That makes it different from the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974, which is a much wider measure under which it is quite common to prosecute unincorporated associations without difficulty. Indeed, shortly before I became a Member of the House, I was involved in the prosecution of an unincorporated association: Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. Having seen not only the seriousness of that case, which was about the port Ramsgate walkway collapse in which seven people were killed, but the size of Lloyd’s Register of Shipping and the importance of its role in certifying new engineering structures concerned with the marine environment, I rather disagreed with the Home Secretary when it was suggested that unincorporated associations might not be an important element in ensuring health and safety at work. Of course, I also accept that in many cases unincorporated associations are likely to be small organisations, but if ever the Home Secretary wanted an example of an unincorporated organisation that is not small, there is one. I am bound to say that I am a bit worried about the prospect of putting on the statute book legislation that cannot encompass such an organisation, so I hope that we will be able to consider that during the Bill’s passage. The Home Secretary properly identified the fact that the Bill includes important innovations. The removal of Crown immunity from Government Departments is welcome and a much-needed change. However, I was a little worried to note that the relevant schedule could be added to or taken away from by way of the negative procedure. That was not because I thought that the Home Secretary was suddenly going to say that he wanted to remove bodies from the list—although that would always be possible—but because if we are going to get the Bill right, we must decide at the outset who we are aiming it at. I thus have serious reservations about using the negative procedure to change the list. We need to use the affirmative procedure. We have touched on the whole issue of public authorities. The Home Secretary was quite right when he said that I might be wrong about the NHS health trust in the context in which I put my point to him. Having read the Bill, I am just not sure. If someone were put on a health trust trolley that collapsed and caused the person to suffer a serious injury, I have little doubt that the health trust could be responsible. If a patient falls down a staircase or is injured in a lift, it is clear that, as an occupier of premises, the trust will be covered by the legislation. However, the position is rather less clear to me when it comes to, for example, the training of medical staff. In a case in which I had a peripheral involvement, some junior hospital doctors were prosecuted for manslaughter for killing a patient. They were very junior and their circumstances were such that there might be some degree of public sympathy for them, but serious criticism was made of the health trust for the manner in which it had looked after the doctors and provided them with supervision and training. At present, that matter is certainly covered by the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act, but would it be covered by the Bill? I do not know. The Home Secretary might be able to intervene and tell me straight away that I am worrying about nothing, but it seems to me that that case reveals the grey area between direct activities, such as running premises, and public policy issues, such as whether enough money was spent on the doctors’ training. We shall have to focus and concentrate on that matter.