Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I have listened to this debate with mounting concern, because I see this from the point of view of how it is all going to work in a realistic boardroom and not the ideal world that appears to exist in your Lordships’ imagination in this debate. It does not happen as noble Lords think it does; there is not usually the formality of everybody’s preconception that they have clear delegations of authority. I have gone through the 13 case studies on my list to see which if any of them might occur in the situations that we have discussed. I cite my case F, which relates to the third fence on the back straight of Cheltenham race course. Noble Lords must bear with me, as the example does work. The back straight of Cheltenham race course has an incline with three fences. At certain times of the year, the horse and rider come straight into the setting sun as they go over the top fence. That fence has caused fatality in the past. Of all the cases on my list, this is the one that you can say with great certainty will occur again at some time in future, because you cannot take the sun out of the sky. But you can doll the fence off, so there is a delegation of authority to the groundsman to do that. He remembers to do that perhaps three times out of five; on the other occasions, you just hope that the rider and the horse are bright enough to get over the fence without injuring themselves. In that case, you would go for the authorities running the Cheltenham race course for having failed to doll off and having caused manslaughter, but they would say that they had delegated that task to the groundsman and that he did not do it. His defence would be that he had not been properly trained; he had not been told the full significance of the task and had no experience of such an incident happening previously, so it was a failure of the board for not having instructed and trained him well enough. That is a straightforward and easy case for that race course, but a similar principle will run through the argument every time there is an attempt to say that such incidents are down to delegation. The delegated party will claim that he has been inadequately trained for the task, while the board may say that he has failed in his delegation or that he had no delegated authority and acted outside his authority, either in being deficient in not doing something or in being overzealous in doing it the wrong way. We need much greater clarity than we are getting close to providing here. If your Lordships in this debate have such trouble in defining this point, how on Earth will a board interpret the Bill when it becomes law so that it can serve—as the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, said at Second Reading—to save lives? It will not do that; it will just cause more confusion. We must get greater clarity so that the Bill can be understood by all its ultimate users in practice when it becomes an Act.