Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I wholly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, that this would be best left to the judges. The question is how we get it in front of the judges in the first place, unless we have a mechanism to make that process occur. I have from the outset of this debate been extremely concerned about what I see as the relative narrowness of the jurisdiction on this. I have always felt that the jurisdiction should really include the boardroom that sent the man out to stand in front of the bullet rather than the man who pulled the gun that fired the bullet in whichever country he was sent to. That is the fundamental flaw in our process here. This amendment, to some extent, overcomes that, because if the man who pulls the trigger to shoot the man gets convicted, you have effectively the means by which to progress to bring a charge in front of a British court. That, to some significant extent, answers my anxiety about jurisdiction. From my original case studies, Case K is a perfect example. Case K was not a personal decision of mine; it involved a company that I took over that was in deep trouble. The former chairman, whom I replaced, had acquired the 30 per cent holding of a gold mine in Tanzania, to which he sent two people to work on its development. He sent them £60,000 a week to pay the local native workforce to help dig the goldmine. When I took over, they had already run up a bill of £28 million, and they had found absolutely zero gold. I cut off the funding of £60,000 a week immediately, whereupon the native workers lynched the two consultants whom we had sent out, and they sent us a beautiful photograph of them both hanging from the balcony porch. In those circumstances, the local native workers were prosecuted for murder in Tanzania, and that would have triggered the point that my noble friend Lord Hunt is seeking to establish. Without that, we could never have got that sort of case in front of a British judge, where the very reasonable point of the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, to leave it to a judge to decide, can then take effect. This is a wholly worthy amendment that should be pursued. As I am on my feet for probably the last time in this Committee, noble Lords will be pleased to hear, I shall take this opportunity to express a cautionary concern. It is what my noble friend Lord Hunt would call a probe to the Minister, rather than a question. I am increasingly concerned that throughout the Committee we have been indulging in a gross oversimplification of what a corporation is. We have assumed that a corporation is a unitary business; very few are. Many businesses are conglomerates, big or small, and as such have diverse responsibility for anything from foundries through to retailing or production companies. Each of those will be run through a separate subsidiary, which will be a corporate entity in its own terms with its own board. They will all come under one single holding company. Each should require its own health and safety officer or director, who would be the responsible party in a case like this. However, they would all be under a single overall co-ordinating health and safety officer or director in the parent company. I am by no means content that the wording of the Bill, and certainly the Explanatory Notes, give adequate guidance on how and where proceedings would apply in a multi-functional group where the manslaughter had been committed at a subsidiary level. Here I take the excellent point made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn. He has looked to see whether a line has been drawn to limit how far down a delegation can go, but if a parent company is delegated to a subsidiary, then the subsidiary would have a separate delegation within it as well. Delegations have delegations have delegations. Given that, I ask the Minister to give some thought to producing guidance notes to simplify this so that corporations who are going to have to live with this can understand exactly how a multi-functional company would deal with these different levels of responsibility.