Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

Yes, but the other way of looking at it is that under the 1974 Act someone who does not comply with an improvement notice will face the end of their business, full stop—they will no longer be allowed to operate. In all enforcement proceedings in the public sphere, history has shown that it is usually the threat of an injunction, whichever form it takes—in the civil courts or through a magistrates court—that ultimately brings about compliance, because such an injunction means that people can no longer earn their livelihoods and are put out of business, which they richly deserve if they do not comply with such orders. I have to say that I am not persuaded by these measures. I do not, with the single caveat about remedial orders applying to Government Departments, whereas improvement notices do not, see their advantage. It is worth pointing out that the Health and Safety Executive already issues improvement notices through the Crown procedure against Crown bodies and the use of Crown notices and censures—for example, 14 in 2003-04, 11 in 2000-01, and six in 2004-05. It also occasionally issues prohibition notices against Government Departments. That must have worked all right, otherwise we would have heard about it in this House. I would rather hope that the Government were complying with a procedure that they themselves had set up. To that extent, returning to the comments of the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), remedial orders may add very little to what is available in this setting. I want to return to the 1974 Act. I am conscious that the Government have already reached a decision in this respect—they have decided that they want the offence of corporate manslaughter—and I suppose that my hon. Friends and I will do our best to help them now that they have done so. However, my own instincts, including a desire to see rigorous application of health and safety in all spheres, make me wonder whether we have not made a mistake. In the 1974 Act, Lord Robens did this country a signal good service. It is a very well crafted piece of legislation. I have never heard it criticised except sometimes in relation to subsidiary regulations accused of being too onerous. The nub of the legislation itself has stood the test of time extremely well. The thing that it does, which the Bill does not do, is to simplify the law in terms of the duties of care owed by employers to their own employees and to those who might be affected by their undertakings in such a way that over the 30-year period of its operation there has been a series of important judgments whereby every weasel argument that employers can put forward to try to justify getting themselves off the hook—for example, passing the buck to subcontractors—has been completely and utterly eliminated. The 1974 Act is one of the most powerful and effective regulatory tools put on to the statute book by Government. Far from being limp in its impact, we can see that in recent years the fines imposed for serious accidents and death—unlimited in the Crown court—have risen stratospherically. The Home Secretary spoke of £7.5 million in relation to the Hatfield rail crash, but even for accidents that may not result from quite such a major disaster, large fines against corporations—hundreds of thousands of pounds for single deaths or even sometimes for the creation of risk—are routine. There is every sign that that trend is continuing upwards as a result of societal pressure to mark disapproval of those whose safety systems are inadequate.