Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I am grateful to hon. Members on both sides of the House for their contributions. I said on Second Reading and in Committee that the motivation of all right hon. and hon. Members is to try to find a workable solution on an issue about which we all care passionately. We all know of examples from our own constituencies, and a number of examples have been mentioned in the debate. I understand the scepticism that may exist. I do not accuse him of that, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), who is the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, talked about discussing the issue more than 12 months ago. In fact, such issues have been around for over nine years, and we have been trying to address them. As the hon. Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley) said, it is important that we get this right and change the culture in a practical way. As we consider the various new clauses that are relevant to the debate, we need to consider the attitude of some of the organisations and bodies that are responsible for implementing the legislation—the Health and Safety Commission and the inspectors, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. In meetings that I have had—not only today, but in the past—with the relatives of victims, and most notably Families Against Corporate Killers, I have been struck by what they say about how they were treated as individuals and individual families. They felt deprived of justice and that they were not supported as individuals. Listening to those families, it struck me as a Home Office Minister responsible for considering road traffic accidents and related issues that families who are victims of road traffic accidents feel that they are dealt with differently from the victims of a criminal violent act. We all saw the outcome of the trial for the murder of the lawyer outside his home, and how people were horrified about that and how the system dealt with that. I want the same to apply to corporate killing, where it can be avoided. I also want to make sure that victims and their families are treated responsibly. I fully understand the emotion that is involved, but it is important that we do not let emotion run away with us and that we make sure that what we try to achieve will be workable and meets requirements. People have come at the issue as lawyers, individual Members of the House and trade unionists. Some of the language that has been used is not appropriate or helpful. What is important is that we give the issue of individual liability a real airing, and we have done that this afternoon, as we did in Committee. The driving force behind the Bill is the fact that the current law of corporate manslaughter is based on too narrow a definition of corporate liability. The law works reasonably well for small organisations, but it does not reflect the reality of decision making in large or complex organisations, where failures in the management chain can rarely be laid at the door of a senior individual manager. It is important to understand that point, because it underpins the Government’s approach. I want to give an outline of the failings that led up to the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, an issue that my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Tony Lloyd) raised. This is a summary prepared by the Law Commission:"““The ferry set sail from Zeebrugge inner harbour and capsized four minutes after crossing the outer mole, with the loss of 150 passengers and 38 crew members. The immediate cause of the capsize was that the ferry had set sail with her inner and outer bow doors open. The responsibility for shutting the doors lay with the assistant bosun, who had fallen asleep in his cabin, ""thereby missing the ‘Harbour Stations’ call and failing to shut the doors. The Chief Officer was under a duty as loading officer of the G deck to ensure that the bow doors were closed, but he interpreted this as a duty to ensure that the assistant bosun was at the controls. Subsequently, the report of the inquiry by Mr Justice Sheen into the disaster (‘the Sheen Report’) said of the Chief Officer’s failure to ensure that the doors were closed that, of all the many faults which combined to lead directly or indirectly to this tragic disaster, his was the most immediate.””" That is perhaps a very germane point. If the focus is to be on individual responsibility, we need to be careful about shifting the finger of blame from the organisation to the front-line position. The report continues:"““The Chief Officer could in theory have remained on the G deck until the doors were closed before going to his harbour station on the bridge. However, although this would have taken less than three minutes, loading officers always felt under such pressure to leave the berth immediately that this was not done.""““The Master of the ferry on the day in question was responsible for the safety of the ship and those on board. The inquiry therefore found that in setting out to sea with the doors open he was responsible for the loss of the ship. The Master, however, had followed the system approved by the Senior Master, and no reference was made in the company’s ‘Ship’s Standing Orders’ to the closing of the doors. Moreover, this was not the first occasion on which the company’s ships had gone to sea with doors open, and the management had not acted upon reports of the earlier incidents.""““The Senior Master’s functions included the function of acting as co-ordinator between all the Masters who commanded the Herald and their officers, in order to achieve uniformity in the practices adopted on board by the different crews. He failed to enforce such orders as had been issued, and also failed to issue orders relating to the closing of the bow doors on G deck. The Sheen Report found that he ‘should have introduced a fail-safe system’.””" There were therefore demonstrably a number of serious failings in the way in which the company set about managing the sailing of its ships. But these were not just failures on board. The Sheen report picks up the story:"““A full investigation into the circumstances of the disaster leads inexorably to the conclusion that the underlying or cardinal faults lay higher up in the Company””" than the master, the chief officer, the assistant bosun and the senior master. The report continues:"““The Board of Directors did not appreciate their responsibility for the safe management of their ships. They did not apply their minds to the question: What orders should be given for the safety of our ships? The directors did not have any proper comprehension of what their duties were. There appears to have been a lack of thought about the way in which the Herald ought to have been organised for the Dover/Zeebrugge run. All concerned in management, from the members of the Board of Directors down to the junior superintendents, were guilty of fault in that all must be regarded as sharing responsibility for the failure of management. From top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness…The failure on the part of the shore management to give proper and clear directions was a contributory cause of the disaster.””" However, in the same circumstances, the judge directed the jury that, as a matter of law, there was no evidence on which they could properly convict the individuals concerned of manslaughter.