Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

This Bill has been a long time coming, as many of my hon. Friends and other Members have said. I am sure that it is clear to the Minister that it does not meet the aspirations of many of us who have argued over many years for the creation of a statutory offence of corporate killing. For all that, I welcome the Bill and congratulate my hon. Friend on securing it. It is important that we have established the principle and can move on from there. For many of us who speak in today’s debate, this is not just an intellectual or even ideological issue. Our motivation comes from practical experience, as was well exemplified by my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton, East (Mr. Hood). In my case, as a young solicitor in the north-east of Scotland, I dealt with many personal injury cases, a high proportion of which came from the North sea oil and gas industry. I remember one particular case in which an oil worker had been seriously injured on a drill floor. The circumstances of the case and the way in which he was treated after the incident were horrifying but not unusual. I was negotiating damages on the worker’s behalf with a representative of an American insurance company. After we had gone through the nitty-gritty of the case and done our bargaining, I asked him why his company tolerated its client’s behaviour and the lack of a proper safety system. His response was fairly blunt and shocking. He told me that it was cheaper for oil companies to pay out higher premiums than it was to stop production or to interfere with processes. I am glad to say that that situation has changed. That incident happened at a time when the North sea oil and gas industry was being opened up and there was a Klondike mentality. The consequences were obvious in the number of serious injuries and deaths but, while the deaths were limited to individual incidents, the lack of a safety culture was tolerated, not only by the insurance companies and their clients but by the then Government. My second practical lesson concerned the inevitable consequence of that lack of safety culture: a major disaster in the North sea. In July 1988, the Piper Alpha oil production platform exploded and 167 men were killed. That is still the worst ever disaster in the oil and gas industry anywhere in the world. The then Government ordered an inquiry under Lord Cullen. As expected, he discovered a very poor safety culture and his detailed report showed failings around a wide range of operations and functions on the platform. When I look back at that difficult period in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, I can remember that many people in the oil and gas industry were stunned that the platforms that they had built—even one on the scale of Piper—were not capable of withstanding an explosion. What is more shocking now than anything else, though, is the complete lack of surprise that we all had about just how poor safety in the North sea oil and gas industry was. It was common currency that the disaster could have happened on any one of a number of platforms. I think that we all just accepted that it came with the territory. It was not only the operating company, Occidental, that was at fault. The Cullen report revealed that, in June 1987, a year before the disaster, there had been a fatality on Piper Alpha. Department of Energy inspectors—the inspectorate at the time—inspected the platform and pointed out a catalogue of deficiencies. In June 1988, they inspected it again to follow up their original inspection. It is clear from Lord Cullen’s report that none of the deficiencies pointed out in the earlier inspections, which had led to the death of a worker, had been remedied and that there had been no improvement. Less than a month after that last inspection, Piper Alpha exploded. There were serious failings in the operator safety systems and even more serious failings in the Department of Energy and the regulators’ inspections. There should have been prosecutions for corporate killing against the oil company operators and against the Department of Energy. The Lord Advocate of Scotland decided not to prosecute Occidental and there was no possibility of a prosecution against the Department of Energy because of Crown immunity. Both could have been prosecuted under the Bill. It is welcome to remedy those failures alone, particularly in the sense that it removes Crown immunity, in circumstances that are of course limited, but important. I should like to refer to several points of detail. Some have already been mentioned and I shall rattle through them fairly quickly. Mindful of the comments made by the hon. Member for Dundee, East (Stewart Hosie), I welcome the fact that we have a UK Bill that recognises that there are different legal systems that provide a common set of principles and approach. Company law, employment law and health and safety at work law operate across the whole of the UK, and that approach allows us to have some consistency. There are points of detail relating to the Scottish legal system that will have to be addressed and I hope that the Minister will be able to deal with them in Committee. On senior managers, I welcome the comments that the Home Secretary made earlier and hope that the Government will be able to deal with the many points that have been raised on this issue on both sides of the House. The last thing that we want is a Bill that provides loopholes to companies that will make it even more difficult to get a prosecution. This is an important issue, and I look forward to hearing the results of the Minister’s deliberations. The most difficult issue, and probably the most contentious, is that of individual liability. I listened carefully to the Home Secretary earlier and I accept that it is important to focus on corporate responsibility. However, I find it difficult to understand why the Bill is drafted as it is, when individual directors and managers can be prosecuted under section 37 of the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974 in circumstances in which corporate responsibility is also relevant. It is important that Ministers should listen to the strong points that have been raised on this issue today. There is also the question of the extent of liability and the exclusion of non-incorporated bodies and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) wants to make an issue of that in relation to the difference between partnership law in Scotland and England. That provision creates a particular problem, because the building and construction industry has one of the highest rates of industrial injuries and deaths, and a large proportion of the contractors and sub-contractors in that industry are not incorporated bodies. We must look at the issue very carefully. The Bill provides for only two penalties: fines and remedial orders. I shall be interested to hear how the Minister expects clause 10 to operate in this respect. It is unfortunate that the Government have not taken the opportunity to be more imaginative in regard to the way in which penalties could be applied. I know that representations have been made by the TUC, among others, about extending the range of penalties available. For example, it has proposed a penalty of corporate probation, which is quite a novel idea that I had not heard of before the TUC raised it with me. I have now been given an extremely interesting paper on it. The disqualification of directors, among other measures, could also provide incentives to ensure that companies take the legislation seriously and make a real commitment to improving their safety culture. I think that I am the only person to raise this next issue. I practised law for the last time nearly 20 years ago, so I am rusty, but I was a wee bit worried when I read clause 22(2), which provides:"““Section 1 does not apply in relation to anything done or omitted before the commencement of that section.””" I understand the principle that legislation should not be retrospective. However, that subsection seems to provide a defence to a company that had procedures in place before the commencement of the Act that resulted in the death of one of its employees after its commencement. I might be misreading that provision—as I said, I am very rusty in the legal area—but I hope that a court would not use it as a basis on which to acquit if a company had done nothing since the establishment of its procedures until the death of the worker in those circumstances. If there is a fundamental weakness in a safety system, or a decision that leads to a death, that is a continuing matter until it is changed or until there are consequences. I would not want to rely on the ingenuity of the judiciary to make that decision for me and I would be grateful if the Minister could examine that subsection again. For many of us who have had experience of a death at work caused by criminal negligence, including the families and survivor friends, there is a great deal of unfinished business. We cannot turn back the clock, but the Bill will help many people to find some closure and I support it wholeheartedly.