Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

At half-past 4, I was speaking for the Children’s Society, and I apologise for not being here when new clause 1 was moved. When I was chairman of the Church of England Children’s Society in 1983, one of the children in our care died avoidably. We did not know at the time that it was avoidable, but we do now. I suspect that that is not the kind of issue covered by the Bill, which relates far more to the Piper Alpha example, where the exact train of circumstances cannot be found. My knowledge of such things comes, first, from working in industrial relations and personnel at the British Steel Corporation in the late 1960s. In 1984, I became the Minister at the Department of Employment responsible for the Health and Safety Commission, and I therefore indirectly had an interest in the Health and Safety Executive. My last commercial job before first coming to the House of Commons was running a small electrical contracting business that put neon lights outside cinemas and theatres in the west end. That involved high voltage electricity, heights, working in curious circumstances and trying to ensure that people were both trained and knew when they could say no. The point about trying to fill whatever gap there is in relation to corporate manslaughter and corporate homicide is that people ought to know when things are going wrong, and if they do not know and someone else notices what is wrong, the people in charge ought to pay a great deal of attention when they are told. To my mind, that gap is worth filling. I, too, have been out with health and safety inspectors. I reflect now on the welcome that they got in garment-making workshops in the midlands and the east end of London. About 90 per cent. of the time, those inspectors give advice. Sometimes people do not have a choice about whether to take that advice—it must be taken—but giving advice is normally better than prosecuting, especially with smaller firms. If someone went into a garment shop where the boiler had not been checked for three years and where there was a chain on the fire exit and people would be trapped if there was a fire near the entrance in the way that people have been trapped in night clubs, for example, when emergency exits have been blocked, there clearly would not just be a health and safety prosecution but a more major direct prosecution. Sometimes, we can look back and not quite understand what happened. Let us take, for example, the King’s Cross disaster. I was present when people were still being brought out alive and dead. The accumulation of litter was the problem. It was similar to the Bradford stadium fire. Afterwards, that was dealt with by spending £400 million on removing every wooden escalator tread in London. That saved no lives at all. An enormous amount of money was spent for no real purpose. We must ensure that we get people to take practical measures, and I rely on the greatest strength of the British approach to health and safety—the tripartite approach. When I was a Minister, I had to go to Europe to resist parts of the social charter and all the rest of it, which those involved were trying to manipulate the rules to introduce. The reason why I resisted it was that we already had a tripartite structure that worked—not perfectly, but to the extent that our levels of death and serious injury, although too high, were the lowest on most comparative league tables. We involved the unions and their members and those who were not members; we involved the companies; and, in effect, we involved outside experts. I have been listening to most of the debate and my mind has been changing on a number of the issues. If it were a longer debate or if I had had the chance to serve on the Committee, we could have considered some of the issues raised by Liberty about the gap in respect of unincorporated organisations and partnerships. However, those are the sort of things on which I do not have a clear view. I will not repeat the issues that I raised when considering the Charities Bill, but I hope that the provisions passed in relation to this group of amendments—this is the kernel of the thing; the rest is detail—will not make people fear prosecution. They ought to understand that it might follow, and as has been illustrated by many of the contributions made today, they ought to try to build on what works and implement it. If they have not noticed a problem themselves, they should take it seriously when someone tells them about it.