Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I too congratulate the Minister and his officials on the way in which they have conducted the debate on Second Reading, throughout the Committee stage and this evening. The Bill makes a significant advance in terms of health and safety. I think that during its passage we have managed to achieve some substantial improvements, not least in the definition of the senior management test, which caused some concern on Second Reading. The Minister and his officials have worked hard to ensure that that core part of the Bill stands up in law. I welcome in particular the fact that the new definition will allow the issue of aggregation of circumstances to be considered. That was a key element in the Transco exclusion case, where it was found that the issue of aggregation could not be dealt with under the common law definition of the crime. The Minister has been welcoming and positive about extending the range of penalties. I look forward to hearing about further amendments to the Bill in the other place. A good point has been made about compensation orders, which we did not discuss when we looked at penalties earlier. Under the civil system, the amount of compensation or award that families receive for the loss of loved ones who were unmarried with no children and dependants is very low. In Scotland, awards are lower than in England, so that case is even more exaggerated. Therefore, compensation orders can be appropriate, particularly where there are young victims with no dependants. I hope that the Minister will consider that issue over the next few weeks. Other hon. Members may have received, as I did today, a letter from the chair of the Health and Safety Commission, Bill Callaghan, about the 2005-06 statistics. That raises a number of interesting questions about why the Bill is so important. Mr. Callaghan indicates that the Health and Safety Commission is largely on track to meet two of the three targets: reducing the incidence of work-related ill health by 20 per cent. by 2010; and reducing the number of working days lost per worker due to work-related injury and ill health by 30 per cent. by 2010. Unfortunately, the figure for reducing fatal and major injuries shows ““no clear change””. That suggests that the way we approach the issue of fatal and major injuries is different from our approach to the issue of improving ill health statistics. Last year, 212 workers were killed at work, 32 of whom were in Scotland. Again, unfortunately, Scotland is above the United Kingdom average in terms of fatalities. It has remained so almost throughout the last decade, which reiterates the force of the case for the strongest possible co-operation between the Government, the Health and Safety Executive, the Health and Safety Commission and the Scottish Executive, who are in control of the prosecution system in Scotland—prosecutions are brought by the procurator fiscal and not by the Health and Safety Executive—to ensure that that statistic, as well as the overall figure for the entire UK, is reduced. We have gone quite a considerable way with the Bill. It is an important marker for many families in terms of hope that we may be able to reduce significantly the number of fatalities over the next few years. Again, I thank the Minister for having the good grace to listen to everyone in the debates over the past two weeks.