Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I am taking the unusual step of making my contribution now because I may not have an opportunity later, and my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) and the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) have asked me to explain the Government’s position. I am pleased that we have the opportunity to discuss the issue in more detail than we did in Committee—where it was dealt with fairly quickly and without much controversy. However, I recognise that it needs to be addressed. In Committee, I said that deaths in detention environments are covered in important ways, and because I did not have the opportunity to detail those in Committee, I want to talk about that in a bit more detail now. In particular, I wish to highlight that the new offence will apply to the sorts of fatal incidents that this offence was originally intended to cover, when first conceived, in the context of proper management of health and safety. Throughout the discussions of the Bill, we need to keep a clear focus on that underlying objective—to take the health and safety agenda one step on and make improvements in the proper management of health and safety matters. The deaths of people in detention, or of those working in detention environments, will be covered when the state of the workplace itself or use of equipment in the building is the cause of death. For example, a death caused by the failure of fire-fighting equipment or the failure of a fire door would not be excluded from the scope of the offence. Similarly, a death caused by faulty equipment in a workshop would not be excluded. Other deaths are also within the scope of the offence, such as deaths arising from gross failures in food hygiene. Such deaths are rare in prisons, as they are in the majority of workplaces. Deaths that are not covered by the Bill are those that arise because of the way offenders are managed in prison. We are not talking about safe buildings or safe practices for carrying out dangerous activities, or the negligent use of dangerous equipment. We are talking about deaths that are connected to the very fact that a person is in custody. The majority of those are, as the hon. Member for Beaconsfield pointed out, suicides or, far less frequently, overdoses that unexpectedly prove lethal, and rarely they are the result of the violence of others. That is why I made the point about numbers. The Government are deeply concerned about such deaths and treat all deaths in custody very seriously, as they do the whole issue of safety in custody. To take just a few examples, the Prison Service has in place a strategy to reduce prison suicide and has achieved a sustained reduction in suicide rates, most likely as a consequence of that work. The safer custody programme, which ran from April 2001, was a risk-based strategy focusing on the riskiest prisoners in the riskiest prisons, with a holistic approach to preventing suicide among those most at risk of suicide, especially early in custody. Its key achievements included an investment of £26 million allowing physical improvements to be made at six pilot sites; the development of a new reception screening process so as to better identify those prisoners with mental health needs, in liaison with Prison Health; the development of a new care planning system for at-risk prisoners known as ACCT or assessment, care in custody and teamwork; the development of independent investigation systems through the prisons and probation ombudsmen; the development of safer prison design, including safer cells; the recruitment of approximately 600 mental health professionals to do in-reach work; and suicide prevention co-ordinators—SPCs—or equivalents, now operating in all prisons. I make those points because my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon accused the Government of not trying to avoid deaths in custody and of running away from the issues, and the hon. Member for Beaconsfield spoke about many deaths. I am trying to describe the position.