Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, one of the reasons corporate manslaughter prosecutions have been so difficult to bring under existing law is that the rule under which one must find a directing mind of the company that one fixes with gross negligence, which can then involve the company itself. That is why cases such as the Herald of Free Enterprise and others never led to convictions. Therein lies the source of the problem, because in those cases individuals clearly could not be fixed with gross negligence at a directing mind level, and thus the company could not be convicted. The hon. Member for Hendon proposes to reverse the process and to have an offence of corporate manslaughter that will enable us to convict corporations without looking at directing minds, which I welcome, and, hey presto, to catch the directors even though no directing mind is involved. That is where the injustice might arise and why, as a matter of principle, I am unwilling to go down that road, even though I can see the temptation. The right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) has an alternative approach. His new clause 4 envisages a non-custodial penalty—disqualification of the directors—and I dare say that we shall hear more from him later in the debate. I am much more agreeably inclined toward that course of action because it does not involve imprisoning people, but I should simply make two points. First, the power already exists to disqualify company directors; it would be astonishing if they were not to face possible disqualification proceedings in a clear case where there was a prosecution. Secondly, the mechanism that the right hon. Gentleman envisages is very ponderous. It is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, because one would have to drag all the directors into the principal prosecution of the corporation merely to disqualify them under his proposals.