Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I am grateful for the opportunity to put on record my support for the Bill, so far as it goes. As we have heard many times today, we have waited for a long time for the Bill. Many on this side of the House and in the wider Labour and trade union movement—as well as those who have been directly affected by incidents, particularly in the workplace—have campaigned long and hard for legislation that will protect all those in the workplace. We wanted a Bill that would cover all employing organisations, whether public, private, voluntary, incorporated or unincorporated, and the individuals who own and manage them. The Bill must hold all of them accountable under the law. Clearly the Bill in its current form does not go as far as that. We have heard many times from Members on both sides of the House about how it could be improved to provide more protection for more people. The reality is that the Bill will help some people. We heard a number of powerful examples from hon. Members, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Doran), of situations where the Bill might provide great assistance. We know that, every year, more than 100 people die in the workplace. Last year, 384 members of the public died in the workplace as a result of negligent employers. We know that 1,000 other people died in road traffic incidents related to the workplace. Many other incidents are not recorded, including incidents that happen at sea but not logged. We are told that 70 per cent. of those incidents result from health and safety failures and negligence by management. We are aware of the scale of the problem and of the human tragedies that are involved. A constituent came to me because her 37-year-old son was killed last year in a workplace incident. She said that it was ““a mother’s worst nightmare.”” Her son was incinerated at work as a result of failures in health and safety in the workplace as well as failures in legal practices. That was also a tragedy for his wife and two young children. The reality is that many of those affected are young people and they are most at risk, which makes it an even greater tragedy if there is an incident. It is vital that we make sure that we have a legal regime that provides effective sanctions to ensure that management are not willing to take risks with the health and safety of their employees. We know that we do not have that now and we know that Scottish law on culpable homicide and English law on gross negligence and manslaughter have been completely inadequate to deal with those issues. I thus ask the Minister to look again at the legislation and perhaps to reflect on finding other ways of dealing with these problems. Many hon. Members have expressed strong views about the need for individual directors to have individual responsibility and to be liable for any lapses in their legal responsibility for health and safety at work. I ask Ministers to take the strength of those views into account and to reflect further on the Bill. Labour Members are certainly well aware of the strength of feeling on this issue up and down the country. We saw it at the Trades Union Congress last month, when policy decisions were taken to seek to strengthen the Bill and we saw it overwhelmingly again at the Labour party conference, where the importance of effective individual sanctions and the responsibility of directors was emphasised. As we move through the process, I hope that those issues will be looked at again, so that we move forward from what is already good legislation to make it even more effective in certain circumstances. We want to ensure that the legislation is even better, dealing with a far wider range of circumstances. The reality is that hundreds of people are affected every year. Some cases may not be preventable, but the cases that we are talking about—cases of gross negligence, for example—are avoidable and preventable. Those cases should be subject to the criminal law and the individuals affected should get justice in the same way that others who have crimes committed against them get access to the justice system.