Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

Throughout these proceedings, I have always been absolutely satisfied as to the sincerity of the Minister’s explanations, and I am grateful to him for the further minor concession that has been extracted from the Government. I note that last week when I saw the Minister there was mention of putting only the ombudsman on a statutory footing. I rejected that out of hand, so along with other hon. Members I suppose that I can take some credit for the further movement by the Minister towards having a power that can be enacted by statutory instrument. However, when one looks at the overall picture, one sees that it remains woefully inadequate, and I want to explain why. We have conducted this debate with some good humour, which I do not wish to depart from, but the Minister was right when he said that this was a serious topic. We are talking about the deaths of people in custody. I think I am right in saying that between 1995 and 2005, nearly 2,000 people died in custody. Of course, the vast majority of those died by their own hand, and in many cases there was nothing that even the maximum amount of care or supervision would ever have done to prevent those tragedies from happening. But in that period, 10 verdicts of unlawful killing were recorded by inquests—juries—in respect of people who died in custody, which seems to indicate that they felt that in those cases the rule of law had been seriously undermined, and anecdotally there is ample evidence that other cases of those 2,000 give rise to really serious disquiet, and a number have been highlighted. There was the case of Zahid Mubarek, who died in custody at Feltham having been placed in a cell with a person who was well known to the prison officers to be in a state of psychosis and to have psychopathic tendencies and racist instincts. A current case concerning a man called Joseph Scholes has still not been resolved and I will not comment further on it. Each one of those needed legal challenges by the families even to obtain an inquiry into what happened. In the case of Zahid Mubarek, the conclusions of the inquiry, in terms of attitudes, practices and management at the young offenders institution, were truly damning. It is in the light of that, and in the light of the fact that, as I said in an intervention on the Minister, a person who has been deprived of their liberty for whatever reason is under both the control of the person who deprives them of their liberty, but also, in a very special sense, the care of the person who deprives them of their liberty, the House has to consider whether it is right that deaths in custody should be included in the framework of corporate manslaughter. The Government, very properly, in raising Crown immunity have conceded that Crown organisations—Government Departments—should no longer have the previous blanket exemptions. That is a major concession that is fundamentally right. As I highlighted to the Minister in my intervention, in the case of prisoners who died in a fire in a prison because there had been insufficient investment in fire protection equipment—a clear issue of cost, management or policy—or because the extinguishers had not been checked, the Home Office would be liable to prosecution under this legislation. That is another major concession, which is absolutely proper. Let us consider where one might feel that the issue of care is most obvious, namely in regard to the welfare of people in detention: making sure that they do not die by their own hand, wherever possible, or by the hand of another inmate—a real possibility, but one which management systems are in place to try to ensure does not happen. In those two key areas, the Government have simply shown themselves unwilling to budge until the 11th hour and 59th minute. We now have a concession which, although welcome—like any concession—does not really take us very much further.