Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

That was a very helpful intervention, in that it brings me to my final and central point, which is precisely the one on which we disagree. The fundamental problem with the existing law is that although there are circumstances in which those responsible for the most serious acts of gross neglect—those that lead to the death of others—can be charged under existing law, that simply does not happen in reality. I want the kind of regime with which my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire, North drew a comparison, in terms of directors’ financial duties. We know that directors who are grossly negligent in their handling of corporate finances can in some circumstances be brought before the courts, and if they are found guilty they can rightly end up with custodial sentences. It is not too much to demand that those responsible for an organisation’s health and safety culture should be in the same position. If we are going to alter the culture, it is not enough to say that we will adopt such an approach where we can demonstrate that there is individual recklessness. There was individual recklessness in the case of the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, but the recklessness of the most senior controlling minds at P&O at that time was that they took no steps whatever to create a safe and healthy working environment. They were simply indifferent to the health and safety of their own employees, the customers and the public. That is why, in the end, the existing law—even the 1974 Act and other legislation—is not adequate for the job that we want it to do. In the case of the Herald of Free Enterprise, there are extra-territoriality issues, but that is a different matter. Sticking simply to what happened, prosecution would almost certainly have been impossible under existing law. The controlling minds—those who allowed sloppiness and who did not care—would still have escaped the full impact of the law, because they would not have been indictable under the charge of manslaughter, or even under parts of the 1974 Act. We must change that, because it was obvious to anybody that those controlling minds were responsible for all those deaths. Because they failed to make the safety case in that company, they should have been indictable. The way to change the health and safety culture is to tell those at the very top of such organisations that they have an inescapable health and safety duty, and that gross breach of that duty—not simply failing to demonstrate that there was a change in individual circumstances, but failing to make the safety case, thereby allowing a regime that did not prevent such deaths—will lead, of itself, under corporate manslaughter legislation, to their being culpable and finding themselves before the courts. Under the regime that new clauses 6 and 7 would put in place—I will not go into the technical nuances of the latter—we would begin to impact on the health and safety culture. As a result, we would no longer see the corporate manslaughters and deaths of the innocent that have been such a feature of British society, and such a blot on our workplaces and the places where our public travel.