Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

The amendments in this group seek to undo changes made by the Government to Clause 6 in response to concerns expressed in another place about the potential width of the emergency services exemption. Once again I welcome the opportunity to explain why those changes were made. During debate in the other place, we were persuaded that there was a risk that the exemption as initially drafted could be interpreted to extend to NHS bodies in a very wide range of circumstances, such as when treating a patient with a life-threatening illness. That is not what we intended. Hospitals can be prosecuted for corporate manslaughter under existing law and we see no reason to remove that liability. We therefore amended Clause 6 so that it places tight restrictions on the sorts of treatment decisions that can be covered by the exemption. The first limb of Clause 6(3) makes it clear that the emergency services exemption does not extend to medical treatment. So, for example, if a paramedic fatally administered the wrong drug to a patient at the scene of an accident and this error was attributable to gross management failures within the NHS trust in the training of paramedics, that situation would be covered by the offence. In fact, that was always our intention. We did not think that the management of an emergency included fatal errors in treatment, but we were persuaded that there was some doubt about that and that there was a potential loophole which could bring in a wide range of treatment decisions. The second limb of Clause 6(3) makes clear that decisions about carrying out medical treatment, with the sole exception of prioritisation decisions in an emergency, are also covered by the exemption. That seems to us to have the right effect. One of the key ways in which NHS personnel respond to an emergency is by prioritising their responses to patients according to many factors, including the number of casualties, the nature and degree of each patient’s injury, the likelihood of survival and the number of personnel available on the scene. Those decisions should be exempt, but treatment decisions would not otherwise be covered by the exemption. We have already debated the noble Lord’s approach to solving this problem. The reason that I think our approach is preferable is that it is much clearer where the limits of the exemption lie. It avoids the need to apply the exemption according to the location of the treatment, which could lead to some arbitrary results, and instead makes it clear that prioritisation decisions made in an emergency should be exempt, but that all other medical treatment decisions should be covered by the offence wherever they take place. I hope that, in the light of that explanation, the noble Lord may be inclined to withdraw his amendment.