Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s approach to this Bill and their willingness to accept good arguments for change and improvement, as the Minister has said several times. The key message that I am sure all noble Lords are looking for is that it must be fair, equitable, effective and equally applicable to all. The Government have stated that the Bill’s aim is to improve safety. That is great, but it must not act as retribution. It is vital that the Government can demonstrate that the Bill is likely to achieve that. The emphasis must therefore be on effectiveness. I shall address two issues: the remedies, and the organisations covered. First, on remedies, I am speaking in particular of some of the railway and oil and gas industry accidents. We have heard about the ““Herald of Free Enterprise”” but the point could apply to any incident. There must be a concern that a court considering one aspect of managing safety in a complex industry might not know the impact of decisions on the system as a whole. There is a worry that a criminal court would start to impose standards of safety or seek to regulate its management in a way which would be more usually done by the Health and Safety Executive. My noble friend Lord Brennan mentioned the Cullen inquiry, which lasted a long time and came up with recommendations, most but not all of which have been accepted. If failure to comply with recommendations results in a mandatory court order, there could be unintended consequences of less rather than greater safety. That is not an argument for not doing it, but one for making sure that the right information is there before the court imposes whatever remedy it believes reasonable. We must be aware that in many industries there are set safety procedures, which have been generally accepted and approved, some of which have come as a result of accidents. We do not want to get back into having two different organisations setting rules on the same thing. My second concern is the organisations thatthe legislation covers. Other noble Lords havereferred to this point at length. It is important thatall organisations, whatever their roles and responsibilities, are covered. The Bill seems to remove some Crown immunities but not all of them. Clause 2(1)(c)(iii) confines the duty of care to organisations operating on a commercial basis. I am not sure how one defines a commercial basis in this connection, but I can see the best brains in Whitehall thinking up how they can avoid being included. Does a hospital operate on a commercial basis? If it is in the private sector it does, but what if it is a trust? Is a trust in the private sector? We could have a long debate about that. An ordinary hospital is in the public sector. Other noble Lords have mentioned schools, the police, prisons and the military. Everybody must be treated equally. Then there is a section about public bodies undertaking public functions. The impression I get is that a local authority will not have Crown immunity but Whitehall will because it is in charge. That is wrong, because the same policies come out at national, regional or local level, and if something is good for one it must be good for everyone. I agree with other noble Lords that partnerships should be included. The wonderful, large accountancy firms paying their partners salaries of millions of pounds, which one reads about, can probably afford a little responsibility for what they do. Then there is the vexed question of whether Crown immunity applies to the Crown. After all, the Royal Household gets a lot of taxpayers’ money and is an employer, so it should be excluded from Crown immunity in this connection—that may be an odd way of putting it, but I think there is an argument there. The Duchy of Cornwall has lots of commercial enterprises selling environmentally friendly food and other products. There have been arguments about how much corporation or other tax it should pay, but it is clearly a commercial enterprise, and some firms in Cornwall feel that the competition is a bit unfair. It should surely not be able to claim Crown immunity under the Bill. The Bill must be equally applicable to transport by road and by rail. We have spoken about rail a lot today, quite rightly so, but it is worth reminding ourselves that, for reasons that are probably historical, road safety is currently outwith the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act and is not the responsibility of the Health and Safety Executive. However, considering that 3,500 people are killed on the road each year and several hundred thousand are seriously injured, while for rail those events are in single figures, the Bill is an opportunity to level the playing field. I do not have a solution, and I do not know how we can get a level playing field on corporate manslaughter for companies moving people and freight by road and by rail if it is not possible or effective to prosecute companies for manslaughter under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Boyd, looked at the problem of amending that Act, and I do not know whether there is an answer there, but the matter needs to be looked at. I welcome the principles of the Bill, but it has to be workable and fair on the workers and the management, and I am sure that we will have useful discussions in Committee and at later stages.