Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

moved Amendment No. 93: 93: After Clause 16, insert the following new Clause— ““Limitation of proceedings Proceedings for an offence of corporate manslaughter may not be instituted against an organisation if an action for damages for negligence would be time barred under the provisions of the Limitation Act 1980 (c. 58).”” The noble and learned Lord said: This is the amendment which I foreshadowed during my brief speech at Second Reading in the hope that the Government might give it favourable consideration in the mean time. It is right that it should come at the end of these Committee proceedings, because it is rather different from the other amendments which noble Lords have been considering. It is of course unusual—I accept that at once—for a serious crime to be subject to a limitation period. There is no period of limitation for murder or for rape, and as the phrase goes, time does not run against the Crown, and as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, having displayed his knowledge of Latin earlier in the proceedings will no doubt recall, nullum tempus occurrit regi. This is therefore unusual, but the crime that we are considering is of a most unusual kind. Corporate manslaughter does not depend, as we are all learning, on criminal intent in the ordinary sense, but on negligence; and negligence is a civil and not a criminal concept. It only becomes criminal when the negligence is gross or in Scotland, as we have also learnt, when the conduct is reckless, which is a similar but not identical test. Proof of negligence in civil proceedings depends on proof of fact—evidence as to fact, evidence as to events and, above all else, evidence as to conduct. It has been found that in civil proceedings, it is simply not fair on the defendant to require him to investigate events which have occurred many years ago. It has been the good sense of the law for many years now to insist on a limitation period for bringing proceedings in negligence for damages. That is true however serious the injury which the plaintiff has suffered and however great the loss. The limitation period in England for negligence is six years, while in Scotland it is three years, but in each case it is liable to be extended in certain events in favour of the plaintiff if he can prove that he would be unfairly prejudiced as a result. We have this limitation period in civil cases, and the justification I say again is simply that it is not in the public interest that the defendant should be required to investigate events when the evidence has all gone cold and when many of the relevant witnesses may already have died. If that is true of civil actions for negligence, how much more is it true of a criminal prosecution for corporate manslaughter? It would simply be an anomaly that civil proceedings should be barred by the ordinary limitation period, and yet it would be open to the Crown to bring a prosecution when it would not be open to the plaintiff himself to bring civil proceedings. I can see no ground for making a distinction between the two. Surely, to investigate these cases, in the case of corporate manslaughter some 10 or 20 years after the event, would be bound to result in many cases in miscarriages of justice, which is just the kind of thing that we ought to be trying to avoid. Any limitation period is necessarily arbitrary, but the obvious move in this case would be to make the limitation period the same as that for civil actions for negligence. I beg to move.