Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time. In concluding our debate on Second Reading, I spoke about how proud I was that the Bill had been introduced and, as we prepare to end our proceedings and send it to another place, I make no apology for repeating that point. It was a long time coming, but it was the product of a great deal of thought and consultation. I pay tribute to the careful consideration given to the draft Bill by the Select Committees on Home Affairs and on Work and Pensions under the chairmanship of my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham)—I hope that he is still my right hon. Friend—and my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Rooney). I pay tribute, too, to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which is chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore). At the end of the process, the Government have delivered on their promise and brought the Bill to the House for debate. As I said, I am very proud of that. I want to put on record my appreciation of the warm welcome that the Bill has received and the constructive nature of debate throughout our proceedings. There is wide recognition on both sides of the House that the law of corporate manslaughter is in dire need of change. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and his colleagues questioned whether a new homicide offence specific to corporations was the right way to proceed, and they suggested that a revision to the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974 would provide a neater solution. I acknowledge that that suggestion was made to test the Government’s approach, but this is not about neat solutions. It is not enough, in our view, to respond to the problems in the current law by removing liability for manslaughter, albeit through adaptation to other laws. We need to make a proper and specific response to very serious failings. Given the complex nature of organisations today, in many circumstances it is not possible to lay responsibility for the failings behind a death at the door of one individual and charge them with manslaughter. Neither is it right simply to place an organisation’s failings on one person’s shoulders. That makes it all the more important that the law ensures that sanctions, such as a conviction for manslaughter, are available for use against companies, so that we recognise that what has happened is not a regulatory breach but homicide. That is the justice that those cases deserve. Our debates have dealt with key aspects of the offence in the Bill—we have examined, too, what it does not cover—and, in many ways, it leaves this House in an improved form. At the heart of the new offences lies a highly significant shift in the way liability for manslaughter will be attached to an organisation. At present, that is bound up with the guilt of particular senior individuals. In the future, it will be about how the activities of the company were managed or organised, and whether that paid scant regard to the health and safety of employees or others. The test must also reflect the very serious nature of the offence. There will be a finding of manslaughter and it must be clear that the organisation as a whole is responsible for the offence, so the test must be one of systemic failure. The test for the offence has been improved during the Bill’s consideration. The ““senior manager”” test has been removed, replaced by a wider formulation that is based on the management of the organisation’s activities. There remains a need to show a substantial failing at a senior level. We are satisfied that that gets the balance right. The question is whether the organisation as a whole failed, and a key factor in that must be the conduct or omissions of its senior management. It also means that senior management must take their responsibilities seriously or risk the possibility of prosecution. I recognise that some of my hon. Friends would like me to go further in redefining the area of individual liability, which we discussed tonight, and to widen the circumstances in which individuals can be prosecuted and imprisoned. Our debate today considered that at some length and I have made the Government’s position clear—that the Bill is about corporate failings and corporate liability. It deals with the fact that in many circumstances it will not be possible to lay responsibility entirely at the feet of one individual, but it ensures that there will still be a recognition that the person died as a result of a homicide, for which the corporation must take responsibility. The new offence will apply to all companies and, as a matter of course, it will apply to a good part of the public sector too, such as local authorities and NHS bodies. The Bill takes that one step further and lifts Crown immunity, ensuring that Government Departments will also be liable. This is an historic step, but it quite properly gives rise to debate about where we should draw the line between matters for which the Government should be prosecuted in the courts and matters about the carrying out of core public functions, which are covered by independent investigations and inquiries and where the Government are accountable to Parliament for their decisions. We have made it clear tonight that we consider the line to be drawn in the right place in the Bill, but that is not to say that there are no issues on which we are prepared to consider our stance further. Another important aspect of the application of the offence is the focus on incorporated bodies, along with the Crown, and not unincorporated bodies, such as partnerships. Again, this is a matter that we touched on today and I am prepared to give it further consideration. There is also the important question of sanctions. The offence is rightly concerned with justice and ensuring that organisations are convicted of an appropriate offence, but we are also keen for companies to change their behaviour for the future and ensure that other deaths are not caused. There has been some concern that fines are a blunt instrument for bringing about such a change. We have sought to acknowledge this by making improvements to the sort of issues that remedial orders will cover, allowing the court to require organisations to address issues that lie behind the relevant management failure. This is an area where Professor Macrory’s review of regulatory enforcement is relevant. His report, published last week, sets out a number of suggestions for new criminal sanctions. We will have to consider the detail of these.