Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

That is probably the only thing that I will get all night. Like many others who have spoken in this debate, I remain absolutely convinced that we will not make progress in this arena until we have individual liability of directors. This is not about revenge or prosecution; it is about changing the culture of the boardroom and changing behaviour. The day that the first person goes to jail is the day that we will really see a change in attitude. If we fail to get this provision into the Bill, the Government will have to return to the issue. It will come back to haunt them if they do not bite the bullet and include such a provision, before the Bill finishes its progress through the House. The Committee received lots of evidence, but perhaps the most telling was from Alan Ritchie, general secretary of the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians. He gave us some horrendous tales of instructions given down the telephone by a senior manager to a site manager to do work that was downright dangerous. The following quote sums it up. Alan Ritchie said that"““if you want to murder someone in this country, the best thing to do is to employ them in the construction industry: get them as a subcontractor and kill them and you would face a fine of £7,000.””" That is where we are at. The whole history of the construction industry sums up why we are in the mess that we are in some circumstances. The Engineering Employers’ Federation was very much in favour of individual liability. Its argument was that the good companies and directors have nothing to fear from legislation; it is the bad people who we want. This is about not chasing people needlessly, but extinguishing the bad practices and addressing the bad individuals that kill people and cause the massive accidents that have taken place. When the Committee took evidence from representatives of the Home Office, I pressed them in particular on whether the Bill would have resulted in any change in the failure to prosecute for the major disasters that have taken place over the past 10 or 15 years. The answer was no. No matter how horrendous those incidents were—we have heard the comments of judges today—the Bill would have made no difference because no company or individual would have been prosecuted.