Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I fully appreciate what the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) has said about his motives for supporting the Government in resisting the Lords amendment. I also accept that politics is largely a game of compromise, and that the best is very often the enemy of the good. In addition, I understand that the Minister must have felt as though he was in custody ever since the present Home Secretary—who has had various political personalities since 1997—took office. Even if, metaphorically speaking, the Minister has been in the category D estate, rather than the secure estate, his freedom to think and speak as he would like on matters such as this has been closely circumscribed. The Home Secretary is due to leave office in a few weeks. When the Minister joins the 7,500 others who have absconded from the category D estate over the past 10 years, I hope that he will feel able to advance the case and the promise that he has laid before the House. It may be thought significant that the Howard League for Penal Reform has announced that Cherie Booth, the Prime Minister’s wife, is to be the president of a commission that it has set up to look into the state and purpose of our prisons. I hope that the Minister might therefore take a rather more advanced view of the need for openness and candour about deaths in custody. I want to make a secondary point, although it is one that needs to be made from time to time. The guts of the Government’s amendment in lieu reveal that it gives Ministers power to amend primary legislation by secondary legislation. I find such a power increasingly troublesome, and this Bill is not the first to allow it. Indeed, the amendment in lieu will mean that a Minister will be able to amend not just any old bit of primary legislation, but the criminal law. I appreciate that the Bill pins responsibility for corporate manslaughter on a corporate body, or at least on a non-human defendant. However, the consequences of the Minister making an amendment that would include a category of institution in the ambit of the Bill—or remove a category of institution from that ambit—are too big to be covered by a system allowing amendment by statutory instrument. We have heard and read about the excuses that Ministers in this House and the other place have produced for not doing what I believe that the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), the Chairman of the Joint Committee, would really like them to be doing now. Those excuses can be loosely encompassed by the expression ““the doctrine of ripe time””. Every Government have civil servants who, by way of a draft excuse, say, ““No, Minister, the time is not yet ripe.”” Well, here we are again: I have heard the Minister produce the ““time is not yet ripe”” excuse today, and one reads in the record of the debates in the other place that Lord Bassam has said things like, ““It’s a jolly nice idea but we are not ready yet.”” In addition, the formal response from Baroness Scotland to the Joint Committee report uses about 50 paragraphs to say, broadly, that the time was ““not yet ripe””. The argument could go on and on, and I suspect that, contrary to the hopes of the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen and the Minister, the ripeness of time doctrine will be deployed for some while. If the Conservative party is elected to government after the next election, I should not be surprised to find that we, not Labour, introduce the proposal. One of the most important reasons for asking the Government to change their mind and to agree with the House of Lords is that, by and large, prisons are secret places. Over the past 14 months, I have visited about 24 prisons in my Front-Bench capacity—from those accommodating young offenders to the most secure establishments for adults, both men and women. They are largely secret places. The public do not know much about prisons or about what goes inside them, except when there is a disaster, an escape or the report of a death. I sincerely wish that the public knew more about what went on in prisons. As a direct consequence of the number of prison visits I have made over the past year or so, I can tell the House that, contrary to the general impression that might be gained from the arguments in favour of inclusion of the Lords amendment, the Prison Service and the private prison providers contain some hugely dedicated, well-meaning and professional people at all levels, from the governors and directors right down to the prison officers at floor level. I do not want anything I say in support of the arguments of my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) or of the majority in the other place to be taken in any way as designed to denigrate or diminish the contribution of those who work in prisons. That prisons are difficult places to work in is uncontroversial. The report of Her Majesty’s inspector of prisons on Her Majesty’s prison Norwich shows that prisons are not only difficult but squalid places to work in. Last year, the Prison Service had to decant a wing of Norwich prison because the prisoners were living in their own sewage, so it follows that the prison officers had to work in that sewage. Unfortunately, owing to the dreadful condition of the prison estate and its overcrowded nature—more than 80,000 prisoners are in custody in England and Wales—that squalid wing of Norwich prison has had to be refilled. As a Crown Court recorder, I put up my hand as someone whose public duty it is occasionally to send people to prison, but when the characters and personalities of people who are, for good reasons and bad, in prison—people with personality disorders, people suffering from substance abuse, both drink and drugs, or people who are intellectually impaired—are added to the overcrowded conditions in modern British prisons, it is hardly surprising that deaths occur. The reason why I wanted to intervene on the hon. Member for Hendon was not to criticise his arguments but to point out that in response to a recent written question to the Minister, I was told that 97 prisoners had suffered a self-inflicted death between January 2006 and April 2007. If one does the maths, that works out at more than six prisoners a month, on average. Those are self-inflicted deaths. There will be others. Right hon. and hon. Members will have their own examples, either from their constituency or because they have a general interest in and knowledge of the subject. There will also be deaths resulting from natural causes. With the increasing number of lifers, of prisoners serving indeterminate sentences, and of people of older years remaining in prison, I suspect that natural causes will account for a growing percentage of the deaths in prison. There will also be assaults by prisoners on other prisoners and, sadly, there will be cases where prison officers—for good reasons and bad—will need to restrain prisoners who have lost their temper or who have no ability to control themselves, and who are then accidentally brought to an early death.