Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

On the latter point, I simply say that that happened after a lot of argument and debate. It was not exactly a willing approach on the part of the Government, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to that position. We are talking here not just about ordinary deaths in custody that are investigated in the same way as a factory accident. Not every factory accident would lead to a prosecution for corporate manslaughter. Not every factory accident is the result of gross negligence. Similarly, not every death in custody is the result of gross negligence. The two cases that I referred to probably were, and those two cases are the worst I can think of, where a prisoner was killed by another prisoner in circumstances where the second prisoner was known to be violent and likely to commit such an offence. In both cases, the requests for independent inquiries were refused and were ultimately ordered by the courts. One of those cases occurred when the Conservatives were in power and the other happened under the current Government, so we are talking about Governments of more than one political hue. In relation to neither case does the Government’s argument hold water that all such cases are subject to the kind of rigorous scrutiny that they should be. Even if the Government are right and there is a stronger approach to such investigations than for other deaths, that would still not answer the key point: no such investigation can have the same deterrent effect as the possibility of criminal conviction—of prosecution. One of the important purposes of the new offence is not merely to establish what happened in the past, but to protect lives by preventing deaths from happening in the future. Ideally, there will never be any prosecutions under the Bill, as it will serve what I consider to be its prime purpose: to prevent avoidable, unnecessary deaths from happening in the first place. The Government’s second argument is that criminal investigations are disruptive and costly and impose a resources burden on the Crown. But that concern with price belittles the importance of what is at stake. The purpose of the offence is to protect life. As I have said, in any event prosecutions will be possible only in cases of gross negligence which, even given the scale of the problem, will be a small fraction of cases, so the resource implications cannot be overwhelmingly great. If it is justifiable to impose a burden on private companies by introducing a criminal offence that applies to them in respect of deaths caused by gross negligence, it must equally be justifiable to impose that burden on the Government, especially for deaths in custody. That exemption would apply, however, not only to prisons run by the Government, but to private custodial corporations. There is even less justification for allowing them to escape liability. Recent concerns over the treatment of children in privately run secure training centres—STCs—particularly after the death of 15-year-old Gareth Myatt in an STC earlier this year, and the findings of the Carlile inquiry into the use of physical restraints, solitary confinement and forcible strip-searching of children, highlight the need for proper accountability for privately run institutions, as well as for publicly funded ones. I suggest that they should also be brought within the ambit of the deaths-in-custody amendments. Why are the Government proposing this exclusion? I believe that the real reason is that it is the result of horse-trading within the Home Office. The Prison Service was clearly worried about the risk of prosecution, given its poor record, but it was not faced down, nor was it pushed to make improvements in its practices and procedures to ensure that prosecutions could not follow; we might well be able to insert a provision to state that the clause will not come into effect until the Prison Service has had time to get its act together. The Prison Service should get its act together, because if all proper steps to avoid deaths in custody have been taken, there would be no prosecutions. Instead, the Prison Service will be let off the hook, pure and simple. It has even been suggested to me that if these amendments are agreed to, the Government might withdraw the Bill. The Prison Service seems to have more clout with the Government than this House. It is clear to me that the exclusion of deaths in custody from the scope of the new offence lacks any principled justification. It also exposes the UK to the likelihood of a finding by the European Court of Human Rights that our laws fail to do enough to protect the right to life. As my Committee found, the European convention on human rights requires states to allow for the possibility of criminal prosecution where a death has been caused by a serious management failure in a public body. Unless the Bill is amended to make that possible, it is only a matter of time before another tragic case such as those of Christopher Edwards and Zahid Mubarek leads to condemnation from the Strasbourg court—and more importantly, before such avoidable deaths are inevitably repeated. Of the deaths that occur on average every other day in our prisons, mental institutions and custody suites, those that are culpable owing to gross negligence should be subject to this Bill’s provisions, if we are to get the Prison Service and other organisations to treat their duty to such vulnerable people more seriously than they appear to do at present.