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Mr. Tim Boswell (Daventry) (Con): The hon. Member for Jarrow (Mr. Hepburn) is to be commended on introducing his Bill to the House, and all hon. Members who have participated in today's debate, no doubt well informed by the extensive and generous briefing that we have received, have done so in a thoughtful and constructive way. That is perhaps the most important outcome, particularly in view of what the Minister has just said, which I am sure will come as a disappointment to the hon. Gentleman.
I understand the Minister's doubts. I notice that they have become rather more intense in recent years, and that there has been a certain backing and filling in the Government's position. But as far as I and I hope all hon. Members are concerned, the more of a political consensus we can get on health and safety matters and the less we bat it from side to side, the happier we shall be, and the more constructive the outcome, as has been evident today.
I go back to the remarks of the Bill's promoter at the beginning of the debate when he detailed the deaths and serious injuries that have occurred at work and the fact that this measure is about individuals and their families and successors, sadly. Almost all of us as constituency Members of Parliament, and, dare I say, quite a number of us as individuals, including myself, have had some experience of accidents to close members of our families and in having to handle the outcome of such situations.
I suppose it would be fair to say that the immediate need, beyond the period of grief, is to look at the issue of redress, including financial compensation—not that that is always well handled, or embraced in the Bill. There is, as has been said from a number of points of view, a need to try to get at the facts of what happened—a lot of people strongly want to do that—and sometimes legal process, even if it is designed to discover those facts, actually operates against that ready disclosure. People are not ready to put their hand up and say that they were wrong; it has to be dragged out of them.
Beyond that, I would simply say that in my experience many more constituents are interested in using the sad experience of their bereavement or loss for positive ends, to say that it should not happen again, than in punishing those who are guilty. It will vary, and perhaps it is right that people should have the privilege of taking their own view on it, but what we are concerned about here is to learn from what happened and see whether we can bring about an improvement.
Conservative Members are interested in any proposals that can be shown to make a significant contribution to improving health and safety at work. I am a small employer, although not a remunerated director, and I share that view. I have already made the point to the House that there is a strong business case, as a good employer, for doing that.
The House will know that ever since the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974, the obligation to address these issues has fallen equally on employers and employees in industry, and that is right. Good safety and good working practices should be the mutual
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responsibility of all those engaged in industry. Beyond that, there is an expectation that as experience of what is safe and what is not develops, as technology improves and new sensors, new warnings and new smart systems can be introduced, and as a new and safer generation of machines comes along, we should, collectively, generally be able to show a better record than we have in the past, and indeed we need to do so.
As the Minister of State has reminded the House, however, this has generally been the case in the United Kingdom. British industry has one of the best safety records among members of the European Union, and it is possible to go not too far beyond the channel to find cases where compliance and attitude are perhaps less intense. Of course, in saying that, I do not want to be caricatured as in any sense saying that we can be complacent. One death is still one too many, and we all want to struggle to see how we can effectively improve the situation.
I shall pick out two themes that have emerged from the debate. In a way they are rather antagonistic, as the details of legislation always are. The first theme is the developing nature of what has to be done in safety. I will except for the moment wider issues of occupational health, in which the Minister of State and the hon. Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham) know that I am interested. There is an important issue about occupational health as well, but in this debate we are primarily dealing with the accident situation. I think that we are moving towards a more modern approach to accidents.
When I first came on the scene—I grew up on a farm; it is a dangerous industry—legislation introduced guards, in what was seen as a passive exercise to stop people doing silly things near moving machinery. That was in a sense rather simple, because either the guard was there or it was not; somebody had taken it off when they should not have done, or it had never been fitted in the first place. Now it is all more complicated.
In a separate context it so happens that I have recently taken one of the officers' positions in the recently established—rather late in the day, perhaps—all-party parliamentary group on patient safety, which had its inaugural meeting earlier this week. We were addressed rather compellingly by the chief medical officer. He spoke about patient safety in the NHS and made the point—I do not have the exact text of what he said—that we were moving towards a system of not so much operational safety in which one takes note of individual incidents, but of ensuring that systems are safe using a procedure of interlocking checks and balances. That is entirely sensible and consistent with what goes on in modern industry.
The second underlying theme of our debate is that we are all anxious to try to pin blame, if that is the most appropriate term, on those responsible for incidents. As several hon. Members have made clear, the problem is complex because there are different places where responsibility could operate, ranging from the workplace itself right up to board level, which is where the hon. Member for Jarrow argues that it should lie.
As an employer, I know that there is always a little disquiet when one comes away from the operational situation. As I am in Parliament, obviously I am not on my farm today. I have a well trained staff of one, who
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has the necessary certification to apply agrochemicals and perform other procedures. I am confident, and need to be confident, that such procedures would be carried out properly and safely in my absence. Nevertheless, people sometimes do things wrong and disregard instructions, so central management might feel unable to control that situation, even if good safeguards were in place. I think that that problem lies behind the disquiet that is sometimes expressed in terms of scapegoating or corporate manslaughter. People say, "We'll get them," but we are never quite sure who they are.
It is clearly wrong for employers just to walk away from their responsibilities saying, "It doesn't matter; we're not interested," and the Minister referred to that in her speech. However, it is impossible to achieve some things at board level, so it is perhaps unreasonable to penalise people who have done their best to put safe systems in place. We must deal with a difficult set of legal issues. Perhaps mercifully, we have not heard too many legal contributions to the debate—I am not a lawyer, anyway—but we would have to try to work out where blame should lie. It would perhaps be more constructive to say that a common obligation exists and that that must be examined collectively by industry.
Let me turn to the Bill itself. It would amend the Companies Act 1985 and impose specific duties on people in their capacity as company directors. I do not think that a distinction has been made sufficiently clearly between executive and non-executive directors. Executive directors are likely to be employed by their companies, so they have health and safety duties as employees. Their companies will also have general health and safety duties. From my lay interest in law, I suspect that if one looks down the fiduciary duties of company directors under common law, one could get the whisper of an idea—a judge could run further with this—that directors already have a duty not to walk away from the interest of their employees. Perhaps that is a matter for later discussion.
As I have suggested, there is a worry that non-executive directors who do not have day-to-day responsibility for a company might find themselves put at risk by something over which they have no direct control. I can conceive of circumstances in which the negligence of a non-executive director could have contributed to a failure in safety, although I do not have a specific case in mind. However, I would be surprised if that was the norm. It falls to the promoter of the Bill and his colleagues to comment on that, including my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Northampton, South (Mr. Clarke), who spoke effectively on the matter and, indeed, my neighbour on the other side of my constituency, my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry), who is a sponsor of the Bill.
To be fair, I think that today we have largely avoided promoting a culture in which the response to anything that goes wrong—things do go wrong from time to time—is to press the blame button automatically and find someone to collar without examining the underlying causes of an incident. It is at that point that concerns arise about the public sector, as well as wider issues about corporate manslaughter. The right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend
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(Mr. Brown) speculated about whether the permanent secretary or the Under-Secretary should do time for whatever went wrong. That is an interesting point, but whoever it was they would not be subject to the Companies Act 1985, at least not in that regard. However, they clearly have some general responsibility for the supervision of their operation.
It is not clear, and the fairness is questionable, whether a duty should be imposed on private sector directors under the Companies Act which did not extend to their counterparts in the public sector. That is all the more true as evidence shows that some performance in the public sector—for example, the NHS, where there is no longer Crown immunity—is from time to time the most disappointing in the whole sphere of health and safety. The NHS employs many people and there are some difficult procedures. As some Members know, I have taken an interest in issues of latex allergy; indeed, the DWP has helpfully responded, for which I thank the Minister. There are also patient safety issues. Many things go wrong in the health service and I am not sure that locking up the permanent secretary at the Department of Health will actually stop them happening.
There is a wider point on corporate manslaughter. If the Minister disappointed the House in her comments on the Bill this morning, she has equally disappointed the Labour party, given the manifesto it offered the electorate at the last general election. Will the Labour party be repeating its pledge on corporate manslaughter legislation? An underlying theme may be the reluctance of civil servants to assume responsibility, as well as some of the concerns about directors that the Minister expressed. As she knows, I share some of those concerns, although I understand the reason for the legitimate concerns of the supporters of the Bill.
These issues are interesting. They matter to individuals, but more generally they affect public policy outcomes for our citizens. The overlap between corporate responsibility, issues of corporate manslaughter, where the blame should lie and how that should be reflected in legislation is complex. In an intervention, I mentioned as an example the relationship between constituent companies in groups of companies.
I note that the Work and Pensions Committee suggested pre-legislative scrutiny. In a sense, the Bill is about pre-legislative scrutiny, but it is unlikely to reach a final conclusion, even with the eloquence of the hon. Member for Jarrow.
In conclusion, I strongly advise the House against over-reliance on the measure as if it were a magic bullet for such a real problem. We cannot guarantee to prevent accidents through the Bill. I am not sure that we can reinforce the need to encourage and celebrate individual excellence, nor am I absolutely sure how much we can achieve through the Bill on any improvement in collective attitudes to safety, although we should all welcome that. However, the hon. Gentleman has performed a service to the House by putting the issue on the table. Like the Minister, I shall not try to frustrate him in his efforts to get the Bill into Committee.
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