Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

We have had some useful detail on exemptions in this area. I shall try to speak as briefly as I can, but I take the point that the noble Lord, Lord Henley, made. He is absolutely right; this is part of a package of amendments that did not perhaps get the discussion that it deserved. In another place the Government tightened the child protection exemption so that it exempts a small number of statutory functions relating to decisions made to safeguard the welfare of children. Only local authority and police functions carried out under Parts 4 and 5 of the Children Act 1989, and the equivalent orders in Northern Ireland, are now covered by that exemption. I believe that I touched on that earlier. These parts of the Act now cover a narrow range of decisions relating to the welfare of a child and in most circumstances the local authority would not owe a duty of care in respect of such decisions. The purpose of this exemption is to make it clear that such decisions are not within the scope of the offence. To leave that in doubt could encourage local authorities to be over-cautious, with the possibility that they would seek to remove children from their families unnecessarily. We do not think that would be in the interests of children or families. It would also be very much at odds with the Children Act, which places a statutory duty on local authorities to promote the upbringing of children by their families. But local authority functions in relation to children are not otherwise exempt from the offence except where these are matters of public policy or exclusively public functions covered by the general exemption in Clause 3. So, if a local authority provides services to a child—for example, by providing accommodation or arranging foster care—a serious management failure in the provision of those services which led to and caused the death of a child would be within the scope of the offence. The same would also be true of contracted-out services. If a local authority did not have proper quality assurance systems in place for commissioning others to provide services on its behalf, or did not take action if it knew, or ought to have known, that a child placed, for example, in a privately owned children’s home, was at risk of serious harm, again there would be no exemption from potential criminal responsibility. We think that this exemption strikes the right balance. The task of dealing with children at risk is extraordinarily difficult. Deciding the best interests of a child requires a careful balancing of many factors. We would not want such decisions to be distorted by the fear of investigation or prosecution. So we think it is necessary that a limited range of functions are outside this offence. But where a child is in the care of, or receiving services from, the local authority, that local authority must do everything it can to ensure that its services and those providing them do not cause harm to the child or its family. It is not our purpose to prevent prosecution of serious management failures in the provision of services that directly cause a child’s death. I hope that such circumstances would be extremely rare and not ones that we had to contemplate frequently. It certainly is not the case now. I hope that the noble Lord is satisfied with that explanation, which fleshes out a little more the explanations that were given on the range of exemptions.