Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I am grateful for this debate on the amendment. I am sorry that Amendment No. 32 was not formally linked to it, where it belongs. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, said that he was confused and not convinced. Let me assure him that there is a serious case to be made, which the Minister adverted to. If a hospital contracted to undertake a particular line of activity by way of cure or healthcare and did not perform that duty at all—I do not bother to set out all the facts, but we are assuming that there is a death—we should look at it not from the position of the boardroom but from the position of the grave and those who have died. The noble Lord suggests that not to perform that contract would be better than performing it negligently. I cannot think that a sensible state of the law. If you owe a duty, by contract, to do something for someone and fail to perform it reasonably, that is known as negligence which falls from the breach of contract. It is not exactly the same as negligence in the law of tort, but if you do not perform the contract at all, it is at least arguable that you should bear some responsibility for it, alongside whoever did their best but failed in some way to avoid the charge of gross negligence. That is why contract is there. Unless—in a Room with such bad acoustics—I missed the phrase, nobody has explicitly referred to fiduciary obligations. They have been a matter for lengthy discussion and do not just belong to some abstract, curious nook of commercial law. They are important. Parliament has seen fit to pass, and Her Majesty has given consent to, Section 174 of the new companies Act which imposes serious duties of reasonable care. I have already read the terms of the section, and not to include these duties will be seen as yet another attempt under the Bill to confine our ability to something parallel to the old law of directing mind and will. Every time there has been a suggestion—from the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, for example—to slightly extend the perspective of our ability, it has been met by violent objections from noble Lords in the Conservative ranks and somehow unappreciated by the Minister. We must look at the Bill in the light of the fact that inquiry after inquiry into tragedies—whether at Hatfield, the River Thames or wherever—has found great defects in health and safety in the systemic apparatus of corporations and other bodies, which have caused many deaths. The Bill suggests that the initial test on a relevant duty of care is the law of negligence: that is so in the paragraphs from Clause 2 that I read out. It would be a curiosity for lawyers to find that duties arising from contract, or imposed by the law in some other way, were not equally relevant to the Bill. However, I live in hope that the Minister will at least consider the matter, although he did not offer much hope. Yet I hope he will, and that his noble friends in office will consult closely on the extent of the duties imposed in Clause 2, which, under the amendment, would go back to the definition of ““senior management””. Under the circumstances, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.