Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. Companies changed their practices rapidly when people were arrested. I was reading in the weekend papers about the banking situation in Iran; urgent discussions are being held with major bankers, some of whom have already withdrawn from that country. The threat of a custodial sentence can be a strong deterrent and can change behaviour; it can concentrate minds in small, medium and large companies. I do not necessarily agree about the basis for that legislation, but a custodial sentence can be an effective deterrent and can change corporate behaviour. Most companies try hard on health and safety, but we all know that there is a small percentage of rogue companies. We probably all have one in our constituencies and can point to cases where a company’s behaviour falls very much below what we would normally expect. We need to address such behaviour fully. That also helps to keep health and safety issues at the front of the minds of other companies that may think that on the whole they do a good job on health and safety. I recently travelled around with a health inspector for a day. We visited one factory that certainly seemed slack on a number of issues. It is not as if the company had not thought about health and safety; it just had not thought about it hard or systematically enough. It is often the systematic failures that build up over a period of time. In the Transco case, it was not a matter of a bad decision taken one night leading to an explosion the next morning. Rather, it occurred as a result of a series of decisions over a long period, the cumulative effect of which was utterly disastrous. We need to attack the rogue elements in business and attack sloppiness. We need a range of deterrents that adequately address all those particular concerns. At the end of the day, people’s lives are at stake. As the TUC said in its submission, it is not organisations that kill people, but the actions of the people in those organisations that result in death. That has to be the kernel of our decision today.