Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My Lords, I will be brief and probably not quite as colourful as the noble Lord, Lord James of Blackheath. He made me think of my early years of wearing a boiler suit and overalls and working for swashbuckling entrepreneurs, most of whom, rather than enthusing me, sent me running to join the trade unions. But that is another story. Many of the points on which I want to speak have already been mentioned, particularly by my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis. Many have been touched on in another place, and I know that colleagues will speak on them today. I am a member of UNISON and was an official for 25 years. I am also the non-executive chairman of Thompsons Solicitors, a leading personal injury law firm, although I am not a lawyer. I welcome the Bill and strongly support its broad intentions as set out by the Minister. I do not want to repeat what has been said about the incidence of high-profile accidents that have led to workplace deaths except to acknowledge the devastating effect that these have had on individuals and their families. There is a deeply serious weight of history around this debate arising from lives that were damaged and may never recover. That weight of history has provoked an overwhelming public concern that rightly demands a law on corporate manslaughter. The lack of successful prosecutions against corporations has led to the public belief that the law is inadequate and needs to be reformed. There is widespread public concern about the lenience shown to workplace deaths as opposed to the deaths that occur outside the workplace. We should remember that we are doing this on behalf of ordinary working people and their families. I am hoping that the new law will help to change the culture at work and in business and the attitude of companies to health and safety at work. The real benefit of a law in this field would be a dramatic reduction in the number of fatal accidents at work. That is what I would really like to see. When we talk about the law, remedies, penalties and all the arguments that lawyers get wrapped up in, we must remember that we are trying to change the culture of the workplace so that employers increasingly have a culture of responsibility towards working people. It is important that the Bill builds on the current health and safety laws and rules. That framework is very important; employers and unions are already familiar with it and it works reasonably well. I want to speak briefly about the responsibility of individuals. I know that there is no real agreement on this; other noble Lords will wish to speak on it and I hope that the Minister will deal with it. Nothing in the Bill will lead to directors who make decisions being held responsible and liable for those decisions. Although the Bill will make it easier to bring corporations to justice after a fatality, those who run such organisations may still not take preventive measures in the future. This matter has been discussed briefly here today and at length in another place. There is a feeling on these Benches that the job will not be properly done if only companies are held to account, but not the individuals who run the company or who contributed to the problem. We must debate this further. I know that there have been calls for secondary prosecution under the criminal law as well as for disqualification of directors. I am aware also that discussions are taking place with the work and pensions Minister about perceived shortcomings in other areas of health and safety legislation. While director responsibility for health and safety is not directly involved in this debate, it is certainly a related issue. It might be a route to explore to make sure that justice is done. What is needed is an agreed way forward that will ensure that the board of directors and individuals cannot evade responsibility simply through paying fines. I have expressed concern about the shortcomings of fines as a remedy. A one-off fine may not be seen to be enough; it may not be seen to be fair. Public expectations will rightly be high as a result of the Bill. The public should watch the Bill’s progress and its outcomes very carefully. Will fines be such that the public will see that justice has been done? Or might they lead just to further cynicism? The public have felt in the past that fines have been neither appropriate for nor proportionate with the offences that have been committed. Fines need to be commensurate with the offence. I presume that they need to be commensurate also with ability to pay, which opens up another host of questions about what companies will do. It is widely thought that courts need a wider range of remedies. People have spoken about disqualification and scope for wider thinking. I sense that a wider debate about this is going on in Parliament, with the possibility of an amendment about corporate probation being introduced. Without going into that in great detail, I would certainly welcome a serious examination of that approach. As well as being a lifelong member of UNISON, I am proud to have been given the opportunity to be a director of Britain’s second largest mutual building society, Britannia. It employs 5,000 people. Sitting in the boardroom, as opposed to being a union official all one’s life, gives one a sense of the level of responsibility involved and what it is like to represent people in a different but important way. I and my fellow directors around that boardroom table take full responsibility for health and safety at work. It is dealt with at board level, and so it should be. We all value people and take health and safety very seriously. We also have an enlarged policy on corporate social responsibility, which is something that we should talk about in this debate. It means that we take the safety of our staff and customers very seriously. In my humble opinion, good business should have nothing to fear from this Bill, because the Bill offers an opportunity for continuous improvement in looking after people’s welfare at work. That is what all companies should seek to do. It is an opportunity also for those companies that have perhaps fallen short in the past to reassess the importance of this issue.