Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on the good humour with which he has conducted the debates, apart from perhaps the debate on the last group of amendments, when it got rather silly—[Interruption.] The Government’s approach got rather silly, which was not necessary in my view, but there we are. I have appreciated the fact that he has approached the debates with his usual good humour. To continue the culinary analogy of my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles (Ian Stewart), I do not talk about the Bill being baked or half-baked. We started with a Bill that was a cup half empty and now it is slightly more than half full. However, there is still a lot more to be done. The Government must be congratulated on making some major changes, particularly in relation to Crown immunity, which is a huge advance in the criminal law. However, that is hedged with an extremely large number of cautious exemptions, not least the one that we have just debated, which takes some of the shine off the ball. I have been campaigning on the issue of corporate manslaughter for almost 20 years since the King’s Cross fire. In practice during that period, and before, I dealt with many cases of people whose husbands or fathers had been killed and where families had been left bereaved. For me the test is: if I apply the Bill to the cases where I thought there was gross negligence, would prosecutions have followed? In some cases they would, but in others they would not. I hope that as the Bill progresses my hon. Friend the Minister will look not only at the amendments he has agreed to take up, but at some that we did not have sufficient time to debate tonight. Some of them are important and raise significant issues. For example, I was involved in representing the families caught up in the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, and I raised in an intervention the question of jurisdiction. If a similar disaster were to happen today, the chances are that the vessel would bear a foreign flag even if it were run by a UK company and that it would therefore be outwith the terms of the Bill. That must be looked at. Similarly in relation to the King’s Cross fire and the definition of senior management, there would still be a strong chance that the senior management of London Underground Ltd would escape prosecution given what I know of the detail of the circumstances revealed in the 93-day public inquiry into that fire. To deal with that we should, for example, look at the amendment on particular locations that was not moved. If any of the great disasters and tragedies that we have debated were to occur again, it would be a great shame if they would still not be caught by the amendments and other changes that we want to make to the law. I also wish to raise a question to do with the emergency services, which was not brought up. In my previous life as a solicitor, I represented the Fire Brigades Union and, latterly, the Police Federation. There is a case for not excluding training accidents. The purpose of emergency training should be to enable people to make mistakes in safety, not to be exposed to unnecessary dangers. That needs to be looked at again. I am still concerned about the question of individual liability. If we are serious about preventing accidents the best way to concentrate the minds of senior management is for them to think that they might appear in the dock alongside their companies. We have not achieved that yet. To remedy that, I hope that we can do some inventive thinking around the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974, and in particular around section 37, because the public expect justice. If people see those who have made fortunes from businesses that have resulted in individuals being killed walking away with those fortunes and not paying the price that they should, they will feel that they have had very rough justice indeed. We have got some significant improvements in the law. As I mentioned, I have campaigned on this matter for 20 years. I have not got everything I want but I have got a lot of what I wanted, and I hope that when the Bill passes to the other place further progress will be made in terms of Government amendments—and I must say that I also hope that some rather more interesting amendments come from their lordships. I hope that we get to look at all of them again in this place, along with some points that we did not succeed in addressing this evening.