Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to have a brief opportunity to contribute to the debate. There have been a number of references to partial removal of Crown immunity. I want to direct attention particularly to Clause 4, which is the exemption for military activities. I particularly distinguish between the references made in the Explanatory Notes to the Armed Forces and those in the Bill to the Ministry of Defence. I suggest that there is a difference. Liberty has already expressed concern that the Ministry of Defence might wish to remain immune to the risk of a criminal prosecution and the public scrutiny that would surround it. I think that others will share that anxiety. A number of speakers have expressed concern about the Ministry of Defence. I want particularly to take up the point made by the noble Lord Parekh earlier in the debate. He made specific reference to last night’s conclusions from the coroner in the inquest into the death of Sergeant Steven Roberts. Sergeant Roberts came from my North Cornwall constituency, as it was when I was Member of Parliament for that area. He was the first British fatality in the Iraq invasion. Soon after his death on 24 March 2003, his family came to me seeking the facts of his death. Having put down a number of Questions and received very unsatisfactory replies, I raised these issues in another place on 19 December 2003, precisely three years ago. Forty-five months after his unnecessary death, we are at long last getting somewhere near the truth. We know that the death was preventable. That is certain. We know that there might well have been corporate negligence, but what we do not know is who was responsible for the decisions that led to his death and why. The family have found that obtaining information from the Ministry of Defence is like extracting teeth from a recalcitrant child. The inquest, which reported last night, askedMr Geoffrey Hoon to give evidence, but he failed to do so. He failed to do the coroner or Sergeant Roberts’s family the courtesy of appearing. Ministers’ reluctance to give evidence did nothing to stop the coroner laying bare the Government’s betrayal of our troops. Mr Andrew Walker, the coroner who heard that tragic case, said: "““To send soldiers into a combat zone without the appropriate basic equipment is in my view unforgivable and inexcusable and represents a breach of trust that the soldiers have in those that govern them””." Defence Ministers do not just govern our troops in the same way that the Government oversee the various structures and strictures of our everyday lives; they put young men and women at risk of their lives in battle. Yet if they do so without proper preparation and planning, and neglect to provide basic equipment, they can slip away, move jobs, and exculpate themselves with what Mr Walker calls in his summary ““justification and excuse””. The Bill goes some way to denying that opportunity to senior management of companies and corporations. If they neglect those in their employ, they will face the courts. In Committee, we should consider the role of Ministers in a similar context. The inference of the evidence submitted to that inquest is that the Secretary of State deliberately delayed ordering essential protective equipment which would have saved Sergeant Roberts’s life in order to pretend that this country was not preparing to join the USA in an invasion of Iraq, on which President Bush was already hell-bent. If that is notan appropriate case for examination in similar circumstances to those that we are discussing under the Bill relating to corporate negligence, I do not know what is.