Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I am trying to give my hon. Friend a cheerful hearing, but he puzzles me a little. Earlier, he very sensibly read on to the record a description of what happened in the case of the Herald of Free Enterprise. I accept that, in that case, there is the issue of extraterritoriality to consider, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) said, but let us go beyond that. Under the Bill, the company would almost certainly have been brought before the courts, but there is almost no case for thinking that any individual would have been, even though the controlling minds failed to establish the health and safety regime that we wanted. Arguably, the Bill would not have been enough to enable us to say to those controlling minds, ““Get on with it, and make sure that a health and safety regime is put in place.”” That, for many of us, is really the dilemma posed in what the Minister says.