Corporate Manslaughter Bill

My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Fiona Mactaggart) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement. I have today placed before Parliament the Government's response to the joint report of the Home Affairs and Work and Pensions committees on the Government's draft Corporate Manslaughter Bill. This is a key step towards getting a Bill into Parliament and an offence on the statute book. The draft Bill set out the Government's proposals for reforming the current law of corporate manslaughter. It would overcome the main obstacle to convictions under the current law by removing the need to attach corporate guilt to the criminal negligence of a single very senior individual within the company. This would allow for companies to be found guilty of manslaughter if grossly negligent management failures led to a death. The draft Bill also took the unprecedented step of extending the offence to Crown bodies, creating a level playing field between the public and private sectors in their liability for manslaughter and ensuring that workers in Crown institutions are protected by the offence. The Government are pleased that the committees supported the basic tenets of the draft Bill and the Government's policy in this area: the need for reform, an offence aimed at the most serious failures in management of health and safety, and the lifting of Crown immunity. The committees made a number of recommendations that the Government accept would lead to improvements in the Bill, in particular a re-framing of the test for management failure. They also recommended that the Bill should extend to directors whose negligence contributed to the death. The criminal law already covers those who grossly negligently cause death and those who contribute to health and safety breaches. The Government do not believe that that framework should be revisited in this Bill, but they also recognise that a conviction for corporate manslaughter will raise important questions about the overall management of a company and are looking further at the interaction between legislation on disqualification of directors and the new offence. The committees welcomed the lifting of Crown immunity. They agreed that some issues should continue to lie outside the offence, such as public policy decisions but they were concerned that other exemptions were too wide. The Government think that they have got the balance right, but we will look again at precisely where the line has been drawn between those pubic functions whose management should be subject to scrutiny in the criminal justice system and those where strategic accountability lies properly though other means. The Government believe that the result of pre-legislative scrutiny will be a better Bill before Parliament and are very grateful for the committees' careful but swift scrutiny, which will enable its introduction without delay.