Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I welcome the Minister to what I believe is his first outing to deal with legislation on behalf of his new Department. It was probably wise of him to delay it until after the resolution of the issue that we debated before this, because he can now enjoy all the pleasures of wallowing in consensus. As the Minister said, it was the other place that did the necessary work with the Government’s co-operation, but in fairness to those who took part in the Committee stage, I should point out that the issue was first flagged up then. I have no doubt that the Government were right to add partnerships, trade unions and employers’ associations which are not corporations. As we established in Committee, some partnerships—for instance, legal partnerships—are now multi-million pound businesses which, if they were ever allowed to incorporate or indeed to float, would probably go into the FTSE 100 immediately, and I believe that such large organisations should be covered by the Bill. I agree with the Minister that we should be careful about the degree to which we extend the scope of legislation of this type. However, once the clear decision was made that we were not criminalising individuals—which I regard as fundamental to the legislation—the scope in this measure became closer in nature to the scope of regulatory offences covered by the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974, which, as the Minister knows, has been applied to undertakings. Its scope is still wider than that of this Bill, because it includes individuals who are running businesses, which would not be appropriate here, but it certainly includes partnerships, trade unions and employers’ associations in its remit. I did not understand in Committee why we were excluding those groups from the scope of the Bill, so I welcome this step. I also welcome amendments Nos. 32 and 35. Amendment No. 32 would"““extend section 1 to other organisations””," which I welcome. However, let me make a plea to the Minister—although I suspect that it will fall on deaf ears because whoever drafts the statutory instrument will not deal with it. If we are to add organisations, it is essential that we do one of two things: either that we add them one at a time so that when the time comes to vote we can vote on individual organisations and not on packages, or—which I fear is more likely—that there is proper pre-legislative consultation before we add them. The great objection that I have always had to statutory instruments as a means of varying primary legislation is that they do all or nothing. In terms of adding organisations, one far too often ends up facing the classic problem of approving of four of them and not wanting one. They are a bad way to legislate. However, I welcome the amendments.