Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I listened with care to the hon. Gentleman, but I ask him, too, to reflect. Although I understand the concept of getting rid of a test that has proved burdensome and has therefore prevented prosecutions, when it is clear that there actually is a controlling mind, which behaved inappropriately or, in some cases, outrageously, it does not seem inappropriate to maintain on the statute book the present manslaughter test that would allow prosecution of an individual as well as a corporation. People will have to come to their own subjective view on the big questions about the point of the legislation. In the end, if the question is not really whether lawyers can define in court the right and proper way to judge a case before the judicial process, but something rather different—whether the legislation can help us to change the health and safety culture—we have to examine how the law can best help us to change the minds of employers or managers who are sometimes reckless, but sometimes simply indifferent. To go back to the Herald of Free Enterprise case, it is almost inconceivable that we could go as far as saying that any of the senior people in P&O deliberately set out to kill passengers on the ferry. That would be a charge too much, even for me, as someone who has the lowest possible view of P&O management at the time—those sloppy managers who were unfit to manage a large company. However, in that context, was the law that applied to P&O at the time, which included the concept of potential corporate manslaughter—even though it was not possible to prosecute in that case—so clearly defined in the minds of management that they could take risks under that law that they would not take under the law that we propose to introduce? It would be incredible if there was such a fine degree of decision making among managers about the level of risk they were prepared to take in a given situation. The problem with P&O was that the company was reckless not by deliberate action but because health and safety did not figure strongly enough in its culture at the time. The company took no real action to drive through a health and safety regime. I hope that the Government will continue to consider the need to make sure that those who should drive the health and safety case through companies have a specific responsibility. In the case of the Herald of Free Enterprise, that was not the captain, the chief officer or the bosun, but the most senior P&O managers who failed to make the safety case throughout their whole corporate structure and thus allowed such lax standards that 187 people died. If we are to change that culture and to stop not only those who are deliberately indifferent, but also—much more commonly—those who are simply casual in their view of their employees and the general public, there must be direct responsibility for health and safety. There must be named directors for health and safety—as there are for financial duties—whose role and responsibility is to drive through regulations about acceptable standards throughout the organisation. The health and safety directors would thus have an adequate defence if things went wrong, because they could show that there was due diligence in the company and a proper attempt to provide a healthy and safe working environment. If that was not so, the health and safety directors should end up in prison—as they should have done in the case of the Herald of Free Enterprise. I strongly support the Bill, although I hope we can improve it. I hope that we can go beyond its provisions and make the safety case that will drive through proper, safe working environments, not simply for those in the workplace but for those who use our places of work—ferries, trains and so on. We must make sure that in the future there will not be another Herald of Free Enterprise, and I shall not have to pay tribute to people whose humanity transcends personal tragedy because we shall have stopped the personal tragedies.