Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I certainly welcome the amendment. It responds to concerns that I raised in the course of our discussions, which may have been raised by other Members, too—that the Bill might have the unintended consequence of making health and safety convictions more difficult. Above all, we wanted to ensure that there was a possibility of offering juries a hierarchy of convictions when they were considering an offence all in one trial: that, the amendment does. I confess that, although I am completely happy with subsection (2), I find it difficult to envisage a circumstance in which a corporation convicted of corporate manslaughter might be prosecuted at a later stage for a regulatory breach arising out of some or all of the same facts. I simply flag that up. It would be rather undesirable if that were to happen, because of the costs involved. It would clearly mean looking in the second trial at facts that were looked at in the first. If this is a belt-and-braces provision, I certainly will not stand in its way, but I hope that the Minister will provide me with some slight reassurance about the circumstances in which it is envisaged that the provision would be used, because in reality it is unlikely that it would be required. Subject to that, the broad thrust of the new clause—and of subsection (1) in particular—is one with which I am entirely comfortable and which I welcome.