Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My Lords, Article 2 under the Human Rights Act guarantees everyone the right to life. This long-awaited Bill sets out the conditions in which employers can be held accountable for deaths due to negligence. However, some exemptions effectively exonerate—in advance—a public service body that may be guilty of negligence causing death or injury to those in its care. In particular, I am concerned that, as the noble Lords, Lord Henley and Lord Cotter, said, the Prison Service is exempted. That is neither logical nor acceptable. It means that while a private body could be prosecuted for a death, the prison or police services may not, even though circumstances may be very similar, merely because they have an ““exclusive public function””. If the Home Office can act with impunity, why should large companies not be able to do likewise? In 2005, just under 80 inmates died as a resultof self-inflicted injury. Many of these deaths are attributable to mental problems, inadequate or wrong medication, poor communications between medical and prison staff and a failure to carry out proper risk assessment. These deaths are preventable, so why does the Bill underline the fact that no one is to be held criminally responsible? I declare an interest as a member of the independent monitoring board for HMP Wormwood Scrubs. The Government may argue that there are several other mechanisms to deal with prison deaths, such as ministerial accountability to Parliament, inquests, public inquiries, judicial review and ombudsmen. Recent reports such as that from the IPCC, however, are not about determining liability. Those mechanisms may well be the most appropriate in certain circumstances, but none should rule out, as sternly as does the Bill, the possibility of prosecution. Since 1990, 10 deaths among those detained have been ruled by the courts to be unlawful killings, the Mubarek case being perhaps the most well known, but there have been no prosecutions. How can one possibly convince a mother whose child has been killed due to gross negligence on the part of the state that she should not receive justice? The argument has no logical, legal or moral basis. The organisation INQUEST argues that it brings the law into disrepute because equality before the law is a key element of the rule of law. It is worth briefly examining what might be the advantages of removing these exemptions. We all know that the prison and police services do a very difficult and sometimes harrowing job extremely well and with very limited resources. No one would wish to see these services pilloried for deaths that occur under their watch and for which there really was no further feasible preventive action. That said, if there were to be criminal responsibility in some cases where negligence is a direct contributing cause of death, it would have the effect of restoring public confidence in the services, encourage greater efforts to implement lessons learnt and perhaps ensure that the recommendations for improvements made by the inspectorates would be implemented. In the debate on deaths in custody, on 9 June 2005, there were many eloquent speeches, all of which emphasised the right to be held safely in detention and the need for risk assessments to be more than the cursory affairs they continue to be. We know that perhaps two-thirds of prisoners and young offenders have serious psychiatric, mental and emotional problems. One speaker—the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy—pointed out that populations in prisons and mental institutions overlap to the extent that it often seems random where they end up. The noble Lord, Lord Lester, said that by taking people into custody, the state takes upon itself a particular duty of care because of the extreme vulnerability of prisoners and detainees. Nor, he said, could the problems that lead up to self-harm, suicide and violence be assessed in isolation from problems such as overcrowding, sentencing practice and alternatives to custodial sentences. In reply, the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, agreed to those points. She said, "““we meant what we said and we will follow through on those matters””.—[Official Report, 9/06/05; col. 1058.]" The question remains whether the exemptions in the Bill constitute a proper follow-through and whether they will contribute to a safer prison environment. Excluding deaths in custody from the Bill will neither help to encourage a different attitude towards negligence nor have any kind of a deterrent effect; it may even have the opposite effect of suggesting that those who work for the state are above the law.