Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

moved Amendment No. 22: 22: Clause 2, page 2, line 16, after ““any”” insert ““duty imposed on it by a statutory provision listed in Schedule 1A or any”” The noble Lord said: The amendment, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Lee of Trafford, raises an important point of principle that the Committee must address. It would allow organisations to be prosecuted for corporate manslaughter where a person is killed as a result of a gross breach of a specified range of statutory duties. The list of statutory provisions set out in proposed Schedule 1A is intended to be not exhaustive but illustrative. It would be open to noble Lords to add statutory provisions; I suspect that the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 will spring to the minds of a number of noble Lords. At present, the offence is limited to the issue of gross negligence. If an organisation does not owe a relevant duty of care, as defined in Clause 2, to a person whom it kills, it cannot be guilty of corporate manslaughter, no matter how serious its failings. The Government have argued that it is necessary to link the offence to a serious failure to perform existing legal duties and that it would be unfair to prosecute an organisation for failing to do something that there was no legal obligation to do in the first place. For this reason, it has restricted the application of the offence to cases in which a duty of care in negligence is owed by the organisation to the deceased. In Committee in another place, Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament Edward Davey said that it seems rather odd that, if a company breaches a statutory duty and in so doing causes a death, it would not be guilty of the offence of corporate manslaughter. That would seem odd to many. It seems that statutory duties are well understood by companies. Mr Davey suggested that this was not a question of making a new statutory duty and that we were always talking about statutory duties passed by Parliament. The Minister in another place argued against our proposal, saying that it would cause too much uncertainty if relevant duties of care covered all duties owed by statute. He said: "““The amendments … seek to extend the definition to underpin the offence with any duty, whether owed under statute or the law of negligence. That would not be sensible. The reason for linking the offence to the existence of a duty of care in the law of negligence is to provide certainty about when the new offence might apply””.—[Official Report, Commons Standing Committee B, 19/10/06; col. 42.]" That was a perfectly valid point, which is why the amendment suggests that the specific statutory duties provoking the possibility of a conviction for corporate manslaughter should be set out in the Bill, so that there can be no uncertainty about the obligations under which an organisation would be placed. A slightly more subtle point arises from the amendment, which I am grateful to have had drawn to my attention by Liberty. Clause 2 as drafted operates as an exemption of liability, albeit one that is far from obvious to someone who is not a specialist in the law of negligence—not that in Committee we have been lacking people who are specialists in the law of negligence, although some of them are not here this afternoon. The Bill limits ““relevant duty of care”” to a duty that the courts have determined to exist in the context of claims for damages, "““under the law of negligence””." This operates as an exemption because the courts have decided that public bodies do not owe duties of care in negligence in a wide range of contexts. For example, as the law stands, no duty of care in negligence is owed by a fire brigade to respond to an emergency, and the police owe no duty of care to individual members of the public to apprehend a criminal, to investigate crime or to maintain public order. Accordingly, even if the express exemptions in the Bill were removed, it would often be impossible to prosecute a public body for the offence because no duty of care in negligence would exist. Extending the relevant duty to those that exist the under the statutory provisions listed in a schedule to the Bill would, to some extent, address this concern. Some of these statutory duties would, unlike duties under the law of negligence, apply to public bodies. This amendment would enable Parliament to decide which statutory duties imposed on public bodies should potentially give rise to liability for this offence and which should not. The basic principle that the amendment would enshrine in the legislation is that bodies can be prosecuted for the offence of corporate manslaughter not only if they are in breach of a relevant duty of care as defined in the law of negligence, but also if they are in breach of certain specified statutory duties. I beg to move.