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HEALTH

Changes to Primary Care Trusts

The Secretary of State for Health (Ms Patricia Hewitt): On 11 January 2006 the House of Commons Health Committee published its second report of Session 2005–06: "Changes to Primary Care Trusts". The Government have today published their response to this report. Copies have been placed in the Library.

HOME DEPARTMENT

Draft Corporate Manslaughter Bill

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Fiona Mactaggart): 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 books.

The draft Bill set out the Government's proposals for reforming the current law of corporate manslaughter. The draft Bill would overcome the main obstacle to convictions under the current law, by removing the need
 
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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, particularly a re-framing of the test for management failure. The Committees 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 the Government 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 public functions whose management should be subject to scrutiny in the criminal justice system and those where strategic accountability lies properly through 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.

Women and Criminal Justice

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Charles Clarke): I would like to make a statement to mark the fact that today is International Women's Day. It is important to reflect on how women are treated in the criminal justice system and what still needs to be done to ensure that women are not disadvantaged in the way they have been in the past, in what is, after all, a system predominantly designed by men, for men.

I am pleased to say that there have been significant improvements towards achieving gender equality, and we are now taking forward a number of important initiatives to ensure that this progress continues across the criminal justice system.

I am glad that our commitment will soon be given a statutory footing, with the forthcoming introduction of the new positive duty which will require all public bodies
 
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to promote gender equality. I am determined to ensure that our policies and practices are prepared for the requirements of this new duty well in advance of its implementation next year.

I particularly welcome the Fawcett Commission on women and the criminal justice system, launched in 2004 and, I am pleased to say, continued for a further year in 2005. The Commission has provided some valuable insights into how women are treated, as offenders, as victims of crime and as practitioners in the criminal justice system and I have been pleased to receive the Commission's reports and recommendations on areas for improvement. I am very grateful to Vera Baird MP and her colleagues at the Commission for continuing this important work and I look forward to the publication of their next report later this month.

For our part, we continue to take forward the women's offending reduction programme (WORP) which recognises the need for a distinct response to women's offending, particularly in view of the rising women's prison population in recent years. WORP focuses on improving community based services and interventions that are appropriate for women, to support greater use of community alternatives for women offenders and to reduce the numbers ending up in custody.

As part of that programme, I announced last year that we would devote £9.15 million to setting up new initiatives in the community which would provide women with a co-ordinated multi-agency approach to meeting their needs. We are now working towards getting these new projects set up in the two selected regions—the North West and Yorkshire and Humberside.

The national probation service is also developing a strategy for dealing with women offenders which will be launched later this year.

For women who do need to be held in custody, Government investment in prisons in recent years has enabled improvements in provision to better meet the needs of female prisoners. We have developed gender-specific drug services, with links through to community treatment; offending behaviour programmes designed specifically for women; the introduction of in-reach community mental health teams; and, in partnership with voluntary agencies, the funding of various resettlement projects, such as accommodation advice and mentoring. The prison service continues to develop suicide and self-harm prevention strategies specifically for women, with a focus on dealing with some of the underlying factors that can lead women to harm themselves.

Following the tragic series of deaths at Styal prison, I decided to commission a review to make sure that there is appropriate provision for particularly vulnerable women on each occasion they come into contact with the criminal justice system. The review will profile the characteristics and histories of some of the women who have died in custody in recent years, looking at the pathway through the system that led them to that point. It will consider also the suitability of mainstream prisons for seriously mentally ill or substance abused vulnerable women and the awareness of sentencers of the limitations of prisons. A further statement will be made to announce who will conduct the review and its terms of reference.
 
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The Government take domestic violence very seriously and in 2004 passed the Domestic Violence Crime and Victims Act which brought about the biggest overhaul of domestic violence legislation in 30 years. Then, last year, we published the national delivery plan on domestic violence which draws together resources in the community.

Between 2004–07 we have placed £5.25 million in the new victims fund to develop services for victims of sexual crime. This has helped support a range of good quality services provided through the voluntary sector, and extended the network of sexual assault referral centres (SARCs) from six in 2003 to 14, with a further six to open in the coming year.

Since March 2003, we have provided over £2 million for the POPPY Scheme, to provide safe shelter and support for women trafficked into prostitution in the UK. Over 100 women have been helped through the scheme and a significant number have been supported throughout the successful prosecution of the criminal gangs who trafficked them.

The recently published prostitution strategy was developed to challenge the existence of prostitution which often puts women at serious risk of violence and sexual exploitation. The strategy provides a framework to effectively disrupt street markets, targeting those who exploit prostitutes, as well as tackling off street prostitution. A key issue for women is around finding routes out of prostitution, and the criminal justice system has a role to play here. The prostitution strategy proposes new rehabilitative penalties for women convicted of loitering and soliciting in order to support rather than hamper women from exiting prostitution and re-engaging in the community.

On International Women's Day it is important not only to celebrate the achievements of successful women in society but to think about how we help and support those women who have experienced abuse and victimisation and those who are among the more disadvantaged and socially excluded. They are most often the women who come into contact with the criminal justice system, and I hope that the work and initiatives I have described demonstrate our commitment and determination to ensure the needs of those women are met.

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