Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

Like the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), I am not a lawyer, but I have to say that if he had not told me that he was not, I would not have known. He made a few valid points, some of which I agree with and some that I do not. All my adult life, I have championed the cause of safety and health in the workplace. I was 23 years a miner, 14 of them as a union official and a workman’s inspector. Safety and health is an inspirational issue that has guided working class people in their trade unions and in their representation in Parliament for the best part of a century. I recognise the need for the Bill to be improved, but I welcome the fact that it will receive its Second Reading tonight. The Government are fulfilling the promise that they made a few years ago. We would have preferred to have it sooner, but we should not forget the good work of my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister in 2000, after disasters on the railways such as Hatfield. He introduced culpable homicide legislation, and this is a further step on the way that we should welcome. For a lad brought up in a mining community, the trauma of miners killed in pit disasters and gas explosions, and dying from mining diseases, was commonplace. As a young boy, I saw my father come home too many times from the pit to tell us that a workman had been killed. Sadly, mining communities knew how to respond in solidarity to the loss of one of their own, because it was all too common. Miners’ lives were a price that the coal owners thought was worth paying for the pittance in wages that miners got at the time. On too many occasions as a mining union official, I had to go and tell a wife that her husband and father of her children would not be coming home. That personal experience influences everything that I have said and done in this place for 20 years. I know, in my heart of hearts, that had there been a law that told the director of the colliery where I worked that he could be held personally responsible for the loss of life, many of those mining disasters would have been averted and a lot of lives saved. So I do not make anything small of this important step. We will want to tweak and improve parts of the Bill, but it is an important step. For those in other parties who are less enthusiastic in their support for the Bill, I shall end with a few words about the 1999 Larkhall gas explosion. On the evening of 22 December 1999, a mother and father and their two children went to bed, looking forward to Christmas. At 5.30 in the morning, their house was blown up in a gas explosion and their lives were extinguished. That family—Drew and Janette Findlay, with their two children, Stacey, 13 years old and Daryl, 11 years old—was lost. The Home Secretary mentioned Transco, the corporation that was held responsible for the explosion. Nothing that I had experienced prepared me for the trauma of that perplexing tragedy. It was not a workplace accident; it happened in the sanctuary of a young couple’s home. A family with everything to live for was taken from us by what we now know was a disaster that should not have happened and would not have happened were it not for Transco’s corporate negligence. Transco was fined a record £15 million under health and safety legislation. It was not convicted under Scots law of culpable homicide—it got off on that. Fifteen million pounds is double the highest fine in England, which was £7.5 million, as was mentioned earlier. Although £15 million may sound a lot of money, Transco was found guilty and culpable of the deaths of the family in Larkhall because of its corporate negligence in not spending £350 million in renewing the pipelines that would have prevented the deaths of the Findlays. It is claimed that a fine of £15 million could be viewed as a deterrent, but it does not appear so when compared with the £350 million that the corporation did not spend. The only deterrent would be a law that holds someone responsible and influences such people’s decision making so that they know that, when they give an executive order, if lives are lost, the price is their freedom. They have to be accountable. It is no comfort to families who have lost their loved ones to hear of fines to corporations. That would not give the Findlay family in Larkhall comfort. We need legislation that protects our families. That is just. I welcome Second Reading but my test in Committee and on Third Reading will be, ““Are families safer because of the Bill?”” Will families, such as the Findlays, who went to their beds looking forward to Christmas, be safer because of the legislation that we pass? I hope that the answer is yes.