Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, which I was going to address. When we reviewed the progress of the Bill in our report, we suggested that excluding undertakings in order to deal with the sole trader question would be to throw the baby out with the bath water. We suggested that that would put matters back to front, and that what we should have is undertakings as a general inclusion with an exemption for sole traders. That would be a neater and more consistent way of dealing with the problem. In our view, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights shows that the public nature of a body’s function has not been regarded as a reason for excluding criminal liability, but that on the contrary it has been treated as a factor which strengthens the obligations to ensure that recourse to criminal law is available. The original and obvious answer to this problem would be to revert to undertakings, but it does not appear that that is obvious to the Government. Therefore, we have the amendments before us now which deal with partnerships, trade unions and employers’ associations which are employers. However, many organisations would still be excluded, such as schools. Schools—particularly large schools—are effectively businesses, sometimes with budgets worth millions of pounds, and I would be concerned for the parents of children who were found to have died in grossly negligent circumstances if schools were to be excluded from prosecution. That has happened. Similarly on charities, I accept that an argument could be made in respect of small charities but some charities are enormous, multi-million pound international organisations. Why should their staff not have the protection of this law just because it happens to be the case that their charity is not incorporated or is not a partnership? That would be unfair. We would then have a differential between one group of people and another in terms of the protection of the law. The problem is similar to that discussed in the previous debate, except that there is no light at the end of the tunnel to deal with it. I certainly do not want to resist the Government amendments, which do constitute progress, but they do not deal with the basic problem of article 14 and differential treatment, and they certainly do not provide the protection that the Bill should provide.