Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I am not certain that I agree. The difficulty is that if a large corporation such as a Tesco or a Sainsbury’s kills an employee, a fine of millions of pounds may make little dent on its balance sheet. One of the problems that we have to face up to is that many of those prosecuted under the 1974 Act are individuals with very limited means. If a fine of £2 million is imposed because it marks the gravity of the offence, it will never be collected because there is nowhere near that amount to be collected. It is true that the company, in the case of a corporation, will be put out of business—indeed, there is authority in the Court of Appeal that says that in some cases that may be a very good thing to do—but unless that is the intention, the size of the fine becomes rather meaningless. Let me say to the Home Secretary, because it is important that the public should understand this, that I am very doubtful that, having introduced the new concept of corporate manslaughter, the fines imposed will be very different. I can see that in the case of major corporations it may be possible to impose a much higher fine and to say, ““We are moving into the £20 million or £30 million range because as you are a multi-billion pound corporation we want to hurt you in your pocket.”” I, for one, have no difficulty with that. In many cases, however, as I am sure that the Home Secretary has been told, the companies prosecuted will be cowboy operators, individuals with very limited resources and companies whose only assets are, in effect, their annual turnover and profit. In those circumstances, courts will not impose multi-million pound fines, because they will be shown—as they are under the terms of the 1974 Act—balance sheets and the accounts of the company, and if they decide not to put it out of business, they will have to impose a fine that is commensurate with its ability to pay it. As has often been argued, in the case of public authorities the money that is levied as a fine takes from them the very money to carry out the necessary improvements to meet the standard that they should have delivered from the start. I have a question mark in my mind as to whether in reality we will find ourselves moving into a different fine regime. The danger is that we will end up with people who, having had their expectations raised, find themselves left with a feeling of distress and disappointment that the horror of what has happened to a near relative has not been responded to. I see no easy way out of that and therefore wonder whether we are not, in enacting this legislation, making unnecessary difficulties for ourselves. I endorse the point made before the Joint Committee—that we should have, under sections 2 and 3 of the 1974 Act, a separate aggravated offence of an act by which death results. There would then be some sentencing guidelines emphasising that much higher fines should be imposed in those circumstances, and we could see whether that works. However well-intentioned the Bill, the fact remains that conviction rates in prosecutions under the 1974 Act are some of the highest in any field of criminal justice—consistently more than 80 per cent. and in some cases closer to 90 per cent. in any 12-month period. That is because it is so drafted and interpreted that it imposes an arm-twist on any defendant from which they will have great difficulty in escaping. It worries me that, in contrast, this Bill seems very complicated. Having declared my interest at the outset, I cannot help wondering whether we are about to create another lawyers’ bonanza. There is a risk, given the complexity of the issues of duty and care and breach—and the fact that corporations might be more reluctant to plead guilty because of the opprobrium attached to a manslaughter conviction—that we might end up with far more contested cases. Under health and safety at work legislation, a contested case relating to a major disaster can last for many weeks and cost a lot of money. It is true that that money can usually be recouped from the defendant, unlike in most criminal justice cases; even so, we ought to bear in mind such factors. Having said that, I am mindful that the Home Secretary has probably made up his mind on that point, but I shall nevertheless seek to explore it in Committee. At the end of the day, we should be concerned not about the words but about the results. Our aim should be to enact legislation that changes the attitudes of those who might be negligent, hits them selectively and properly in their pockets to encourage them to act with care, and produces a better sense of public justice. However, those three aims need to be kept in the balance, and the test of the Bill’s success will not be what we say in the House but whether it achieves those results.