Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

There are two points to make. One can be made quite quickly, but it is worth dwelling on. The people who came in for the most blame were, in corporate terms, relatively junior, although the bosun and the master are not so junior. They were operating a system that was enshrined by customer practice. It happened to be astonishingly dangerous but, nevertheless, it was enshrined by customer practice, because there was no higher safety case. The other thing that came out in the report was the pressure—one could say for profit, but, in any case, to manage corporate objectives and turn the ships round with no loss of time—was so intense that the safety case was not able to be made relative to those other objectives. That was what went wrong and that was why there was not the safety culture. Those other cultures drove the safety culture out.