---

Gregory Barker: I note that the hon. Gentleman has been speaking for longer than the Bill's promoter and Front Benchers representing Her Majesty's Opposition. I wonder whether he is up to his old Friday tricks again. While he professes support for such a Bill, is he filibustering to talk one out again?

Mr. Dismore: I never filibuster a Bill. If I had been filibustering, I would have been brought to book by the Chair on every occasion it is alleged that I have done so, as the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) knows.

I was about to bring my remarks to a close, but I have spoken for a little longer than might have been expected because I have taken a number of interventions from around the Chamber. This is an issue that I feel
 
14 May 2004 : Column 644
 
passionately about, having spent my whole working life in this area. I welcome the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton and wish it every success.

2.14 pm

The Minister for Work (Jane Kennedy): This is my first opportunity as Minister with responsibility for health and safety to mark the fact that today the ninth victim of the explosion at Grovepark Mills in Glasgow was recovered from the ruins, leaving 42 people injured, 16 of them seriously. I want to place on the record my deep sadness and dismay at the incident and confirm that the Health and Safety Executive will investigate the causes of the disaster with its usual vigour. No doubt all hon. Members look forward with interest to receiving its report.

I compliment the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) on his first outing at the Dispatch Box. I am pleased with his constructive approach, as, no doubt, are other hon. Members. We join him in supporting the Bill, although I grant that there are some issues that he will want to raise, not least with me and my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love), in Committee, should we get to that stage, which I sincerely hope we will. All hon. Members, including the right hon. Members for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) and for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith), approached the issue with a constructive attitude, and I hope to deal with one or two of their concerns.

For the avoidance of any doubt, let me stress that the Government very much welcome the Bill. The proposals are entirely consistent with our overall health and safety strategy, and are additional and complementary to our other work. The courts are prevented from imposing adequate penalties in some of the most serious health and safety cases. It is important to remember that someone injured by a breach of the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974 is no less a victim than someone who is assaulted. It is vital that the courts reflect the growing condemnation that society reserves for businesses and individuals who gain at the expense of people's health and safety, or who fail to insure against the possibility of harm being done to those whom it is their duty to protect. It is wrong that a relatively small number of businesses can gain a commercial advantage from putting at risk the lives of their workers and members of the public, or from failing to insure their liabilities to their employees.

The Bill would not change the requirements on business, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton said, but it would help to ensure that sentences for health and safety offences can more easily be set at a level that deters those tempted to flout the law. It is for the courts to decide the appropriate penalty for the health and safety offences brought before them. By extending the £20,000 maximum fine available to the lower courts and making imprisonment an option for most offences, the Bill would give the courts the full scope to exercise their discretion and judgment. It would also significantly improve the main penalty provision of the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969.

Penalties currently imposed by the courts on employers who fail to insure are low, yet the offence can have very serious consequences. Employees who fall
 
14 May 2004 : Column 645
 
victim to an employer's failure of health and safety management would much prefer not to have been disabled or made ill. It is a great injustice if they cannot be compensated because their employer broke the law by not insuring his liabilities. Not only does non-compliance reduce the protection for employees, but it transfers the liabilities to the taxpayer when the employer is negligent and gives the unscrupulous an unlawful competitive advantage.

The House knows that we recently conducted a major review of employers' liability compulsory insurance, and we are working to deliver the resulting recommendations. Hon. Members expressed concerns about the level of premiums that businesses will face. I reassure them that we recognise that too many businesses have faced steep price increases, late renewals and premiums that fail to reflect their health and safety record. The market has not failed, but it has not worked well enough. We are taking forward the recommendations of the industry review, the detail of which I shall reserve for our discussions in Committee, when hon. Members will have an opportunity to probe further the Government's approach to the problem.

We have shown that we have recognised the problems in the market. We are committed to helping companies to find the appropriate cover, but as well as helping responsible businesses, we need to provide an effective deterrent to this type of offending. The Bill seeks to provide one. We welcome it, and I hope that it receives a fair wind.

2.20 pm

Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): What a marvellous day in the House of Commons, with lots of Bills under consideration and lots of progress being made. I am sure that that is a very good thing.

I start by answering the question that the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) asked, because it gives me the opportunity to put on record yet again one of my very favourite quotations. He asked me whether I opposed all private Members' Bills, and my answer is to give a quotation from none other than Winston Churchill himself. In 1931, before the Select Committee on Procedure, he said:

"I am not very anxious to help private Member's Bills. I have seen a great many of them brought forward, and in most cases it was a very good thing that they did not pass. I think there ought to be a very effective procedure for making it difficult for all sorts of happy thoughts to be carried on to the Statute Book."

Sir Winston Churchill, none other. I have always subscribed very much to that view, and that is my answer to the hon. Gentleman.

Those here present who are here every Friday, of whom I can see only one, namely the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore)—[Interruption.] And of course yourself, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I do apologise. Those Members will concede that I have on occasion been happy to allow progress to be made by—[Interruption.] And, I am reminded, that also here present is the Government Whip, the hon. Member for West Carmarthen and South Pembrokeshire (Mr. Ainger), lurking silently and sinisterly just to make sure that everything is as it should be. I apologise to him for not giving him that credit.
 
14 May 2004 : Column 646
 

I hope that those hon. Members will recognise that I have on occasion been happy to support private Members' Bills and to allow them to make progress. Where I think that a private Member's Bill is modest in scope, is uncontroversial and involves no cost to the taxpayer, I believe that it should in most cases make progress. That has always been my view and it remains my view. However, if such a Bill is, by contrast, controversial, complex or significant in its scope, then I think that it should properly be a Government Bill.

This Bill almost certainly comes into that category. It is all very well for—[Interruption.] The Minister is sighing. I welcome her to her new responsibilities. She will not know this, but I myself was the Minister responsible for health and safety, way back in the good old days between 1990 and 1992 in the old Department of Employment, so I know a little of what I speak and of what I am about to say. I visited construction sites with my hard hat on as the Minister with responsibility for the Health and Safety Executive, and I was responsible for the HSE's budget. Today, my remarks will not be made out of complete ignorance or prejudice, which I know that some Members believe is often the case. On this occasion, they might actually be slightly informed.

Mr. Dismore: On the question of being informed, the right hon. Gentleman said that he was the Minister with responsibility for the Health and Safety Executive between 1990 and 1992. Will he clarify whether he supports the work of the HSE and wants to help it to improve its enforcement activities?

Mr. Forth: The hon. Gentleman would have to ask the HSE what its view was at the time. I hope that I discharged my responsibilities in a proper manner and gave it full support as the sponsoring Minister.

In a spirit of generosity to the Minister, I just want to remark that she looks so disappointed that the Bill is not going to float through the House today and into Committee, where she is so anxious to be able to let us know the Government's attitude. I am sorry, but her hon. Friends have already taken up quite a lot of time today—longer than I will have been on my feet by the time it gets to 2.30 pm, I should remind her. The House has been extraordinarily generous in its attitude to Bills today, but that generosity has just run out. The Minister will have to find another way forward. She will either have to persuade her hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton to find a different way to get the measure to make progress or—here is a really radical thought—perhaps the Government should make this a Government Bill.

This is a Government Bill anyway, we all know that. We all know that an alarming proportion of the Bills that pass through this House are Government Bills in very thin disguise, except for the many, many Bills that, as I reminded the House earlier, are killed by Ministers. The Minister should be aware of the fact that on every private Members' Friday this year, her ministerial colleagues have talked out six Bills from the Front Bench—I can provide her with the list of them that I have compiled, if she wants to see it. The other two were talked out by the hon. Members for Hendon and for Greenock and Inverclyde (David Cairns). The Minister must therefore not be too disappointed if this Bill does
 
14 May 2004 : Column 647
 
not make progress today, because her colleagues—Ministers in this Government—have been responsible for the demise of several Bills already this year. But I do not want to get too bogged down in that matter, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You want me to get on to the Bill, and I shall be only too happy to do so.

We have already seen, from the analysis that has been offered to us by the promoter of the Bill, and by the hon. Member for Hendon and the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith), that there is a real tension between what we want to achieve and the downside risks involved in trying to achieve it. This is something that often surfaces in public and governmental life: a desire to see an objective obtained, either by legislating—as we have just seen in the case of the Sex Discrimination (Clubs and Other Private Associations) Bill—or by imposing penalties. We often have to measure this kind of thing against the likely results that could arise.

In this case, it has already emerged that one of the real risks of the Bill is that businesses—mainly small businesses—could be so adversely affected by it that we might suffer a significant loss of employment. I well recognise the dilemma involved. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed gave us an example in his excellent speech of a small business involved in a hazardous pursuit—in this case, mining—being faced with the dilemma of whether to continue with insurance cover, which can be very difficult and expensive to maintain, or to go out of business because it could not obtain or afford such cover, in which case the unfortunate man whom the right hon. Gentleman mentioned would be unemployed instead of risking being seriously injured down the mine.

That is a dreadful dilemma, to which there is no obvious answer. There will certainly be no obvious answer to the people most directly involved. It is all very well for us to theorise about these matters, with a Bill in front of us and the best of intentions—as ever we have in this place—but we must always have regard to the realities of the people out there who are struggling to make a living, striving to build a business and undertaking the difficult responsibilities involved in employing other people. So when we come to consider this kind of measure, we should look at all these things in the round.

In that regard, the hon. Member for Edmonton was typically honest and straightforward in saying that, among the representations that had been made to him were a number from the CBI, the Institute of Directors and the Federation of Small Businesses, all of whom predictably said, "Of course we agree with the objectives of the Bill, but—". That "but" is very important. They
 
14 May 2004 : Column 648
 
seemed to be arguing, on the one hand, that the custodial sentences built in to the Bill may well be too harsh, and on the other, that small businesses could be so adversely affected by the Bill that many of them could be driven out of business altogether.

It is also worth noting—this is just a footnote at this stage—that at the very time when complaints are being made about bulging prisons, the excessive prison population, and people being in prisons who should not be there, we are introducing yet another measure that at least has the potential to put more people into prison. It is for us to judge whether custodial sentences are desirable, and we shall make that judgment if the Bill makes any further progress, but let us at least take a sideways glance at the fact that at the same time as we and our colleagues are complaining bitterly about people being put in prison, we are being urged to support a Bill that would exacerbate the problem.

Employer's insurance forms a major part of the Bill. As I said in an earlier intervention, we should look at the advisability of incorporating into the Bill a specific amount in regard to fines and penalties. I have often come across this issue over the years—

---