Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

Home Office Ministers will be pleased to know that, unlike the hon. Members for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), I am neither a specialist in health and safety law nor a personal injury lawyer. However, like them, I am prepared to give the Bill a guarded welcome. Introducing the legislation, the Home Secretary rightly drew attention to the need for it. Too many families look on the disasters that we have seen in this country over the past 20 years, and are suffering still. They feel that an injustice has occurred, in that the corporations and individuals who were responsible have not faced prosecution or fines as they believe they should have, primarily because of the difficulty of securing convictions under the existing law. What was known as the identification principle—the need to find individual responsibility before one could take the corporation to court—has been the main barrier to successful prosecutions and the Bill is supposed to put that right. To the extent that it goes some way to doing that, despite the criticisms that we have heard today, it is to be welcomed. We need legislation that can give the justice that the families and wider society require and that ensures that there is a deterrent for the managers of corporations to make sure that they treat health and safety with the seriousness that it needs. There should be no leniency for those responsible for deaths in the work place or as a result of organisational activity. One is left rather surprised that the Home Secretary did not give more of an apology in his opening remarks. The Bill has been long promised and long delayed. I have counted the number of promises that Ministers have made on the record since Labour came to power in 1997. There have been 12 over those years, beginning at the 1997 Labour party conference, when the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) promised to introduce an offence of corporate killing. Nothing happened. We had to wait until 2000, when a Home Office consultation paper promised action. Nothing happened. In the Queen’s Speech at the end of 2000, we were promised a Bill. Nothing happened. We were told in Labour’s 2001 manifesto that there would be action. Nothing happened. We were told that a draft Bill would be published in May 2003. Nothing happened. I could go on with the list of promises. We were promised a Bill in the 2004 Session. A Bill was published, but did not go through in that Session. We are now the other side of the last election and we have had to wait a year between the publication of the Bill and the debate on the Floor of the House. There have been a lot of delays, during which there has been a lot of watering-down of some of the promises made to the electorate in three manifestos. It is the duty of this House to ask serious questions about why the Government have U-turned on a number of issues and why the legislation, while welcome, still does not have the teeth it needs. There seems to have been an awful lot of lobbying from Whitehall and corporate interests to water down some of the proposals. I hope that, as the Bill goes through the House, we can put some teeth back into it. It is right that we pay tribute to the Law Commission, to some of the officials, particularly those who worked on the earlier consultations, and to the Select Committees on Home Affairs and on Work and Pensions, which made real criticisms in their pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. My concern is that the Government responded to some harsh criticisms of the Bill by almost ignoring them. The Home Secretary said that the Government had taken on board some of the criticisms. I see almost no sign of that and would be interested if the Minister could point to any areas of real significance where the Government have shifted from the draft Bill. Like the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), I am concerned that public expectations that action is being taken are being raised but may well not be met in practice. We have a number of concerns and I want to focus on five.