Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, for his support and to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, for his explanation of why he feels that the words are necessary. I was very interested in what the Minister said. In many ways, he is reflecting on my concern with regard to strategic management failures. I would have expected him to say that what we are doing here is including strategic organisational failures. There lies the problem. Are we dealing here with a disjunctive or a conjunctive ““or””? Do we state in the Bill, ““the way in which its activities are managed and organised””, or just, "““the way in which its activities are organised””?" This is why I raised the question and why the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, is still a little unsure exactly what the Minister is saying. Those who are responsible for the organisation might be completely different from those who are responsible for the management. We want to make sure that any alternatives that we use are true alternatives and that we are dealing here with disjunction rather than conjunction. We need to be sure that, where alternatives exist, they will not enable people to say, ““Oh, well, that doesn’t apply here””. My noble friend Lord James of Blackheath urged us all at Second Reading to make sure that the legislation is simple and easy to understand. I rather liked his observation that it should be sufficiently simple to be understood in the boardroom—I do not think that he said quite that; the boardroom is normally a place where intelligent people reside. Nevertheless, when one is enacting serious consequences for particular actions, it is important that the legislation is easy to understand. I and my colleagues on the All-Party Group on Occupational Safety and Health hope that the Bill will deliver a completely new sense of responsibility for health and safety. Over a number of years, health and safety has been delegated; it has become the responsibility of someone else. It has not been felt to be of critical importance in the boardroom. That is where we want the responsibility to be felt. I do not want to see circumstances in which some other group of people is responsible for the organisation of the factory floor, to take the Minister’s example. I do not want to see the responsibility shifted into a vague morass somewhere else. We want it to be clear and simple. As soon as one inserts the word ““or””, one starts to complicate matters. If we are dealing with strategic management failures rather than strategic organisational failures, we should confine the wording to ““managed”” and not introduce the alternative of ““organised””. I am not quite sure that the Minister has convinced me—I probably speak also for the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis—but we shall carefully reflect, in particular on what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendments Nos. 4 to 8 not moved.]