Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I hope that noble Lords will forgive me as this is the first time that I have ever set foot in a Grand Committee and I am unfamiliar with the protocols and procedures. In listening to the debate, I can think only in terms of what I would do now if I were sitting in a boardroom having to make a decision which had a bearing on this issue. I would not be able to rate the failure of care on a scale of one to 10, and I would not know where I had fallen below if I rated it as three, five, six or seven. However, I would guide members of my board in deciding whether they should take some action which carried a risk and I would consider whether, as a result, we were placing an individual in the company’s employment in harm’s way. That is the missing element in this debate. The question is not the degree of risk attaching to the matter in the abstract; it is specifically whether any individual decision places an employee or employees or the public in harm’s way. I am critical of the wording as it is drafted because those words have not appeared anywhere in the Bill and, as I said at Second Reading, they are the missing words which will have a great deal more significance for people in understanding their responsibility in a boardroom when they come to live with this legislation in years to come.