Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

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The Committee consisted of the following Members:

Chairmen: Mr. Joe Benton, †Mr. Roger Gale

† Brokenshire, James (Hornchurch) (Con)

† Campbell, Mr. Alan (Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury)

† Davey, Mr. Edward (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)

† Duddridge, James (Rochford and Southend, East) (Con)

† Fabricant, Michael (Lichfield) (Con)

† Flello, Mr. Robert (Stoke-on-Trent, South) (Lab)

† Grieve, Mr. Dominic (Beaconsfield) (Con)

† Gwynne, Andrew (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)

† Lloyd, Tony (Manchester, Central) (Lab)

† McGovern, Mr. Jim (Dundee, West) (Lab)

† McKechin, Ann (Glasgow, North) (Lab)

† Snelgrove, Anne (South Swindon) (Lab)

† Stewart, Ian (Eccles) (Lab)

† Sutcliffe, Mr. Gerry (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department)

† Swinson, Jo (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)

† Taylor, Ms Dari (Stockton, South) (Lab)

† Wright, Jeremy (Rugby and Kenilworth) (Con)

Emily Commander, Sarah Hartwell-Naguib,Committee Clerks

† attended the Committee

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Standing Committee B

Thursday 19 October 2006

(Morning)

[Mr. Roger Gale in the Chair]

Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

9 am

The Chairman: Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Hon. Members: Good morning.

The Chairman: You can put the apples on my desk later.

I have a couple of housekeeping notes for the Committee. First, hon. Members have my permission to remove their jackets if they wish. Secondly, I remind the Committee that adequate notice should be given of amendments; as a general rule, Mr. Benton and I will not call starred amendments, including any starred amendments that may be reached during the afternoon sittings.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Gerry Sutcliffe): I beg to move,

That—

(1) during proceedings on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, the Standing Committee shall (in addition to its first meeting at 9.00 a.m. on Thursday 19th October) meet—

(a) at 2.00 p.m. on Thursday 19th October;

(b) at 10.30 a.m. and 4.00 p.m. on Tuesday 24th October;

(c) at 9.00 a.m. and 2.00 p.m. on Thursday 26th October;

(d) at 10.30 a.m. and 4.00 p.m. on Tuesday 31st October;

(2) the proceedings shall be taken in the following order: Clause 1; Schedule 1; Clauses 2 to 21; Schedule 2; Clauses 22 to 24; new Clauses; new Schedules; remaining proceedings on the Bill;

(3) the proceedings shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at 7.00 p.m. on Tuesday 31st October.

I am glad once again, Mr. Gale, to have the opportunity to serve under your chairmanship and that of your esteemed co-Chairman, Mr. Benton. I am sure that our discussions about the Bill will be extremely constructive. I welcome the hon. Members for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey); I look forward to our debates. Indeed, I welcome all members of the Committee. I hope that they agree that the motion will gives us sufficient time to enable proper scrutiny of this short but significant Bill.

I welcome the broad support for the new offence that was expressed on Second Reading, although I note that the support of the hon. Member for Beaconsfield takes the form of attempting to delete almost all of the Bill.

The Bill will create an important new offence, specifically targeting the worst health and safety breaches—those that result in death—and properly labelling them. We have considered the many ways of achieving it, but we

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believe that merely making additions to the regulatory framework for health and safety would not be good enough.

The Bill will create a new offence to deal adequately with the gross organisational failings that cause death, and employees and service users in both the public and the private sectors will be protected by its provisions. It also addresses the imbalances between small and large companies; in practice, the current law is truly effective only against small companies. It puts the public and private sectors on an equal footing, and it penalises companies that seek to gain competitive advantage by cutting costs on health and safety.

I look forward to the opportunity to explain more fully the purpose of the Bill, and as always I shall listen carefully to the Committee. I hope that our scrutiny will improve the Bill. I believe that it represents a good compromise in a contentious area.

Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con): I thank the Minister for his kind words of welcome. I join him in welcoming you, Mr. Gale, to the Chair; I look forward to your chairmanship and that of your co-Chairman, Mr. Benton.

May I say at the outset that the programme motion is one of the few during my time in Parliament that will allow adequate time for scrutiny? I am grateful to the Government for having provided what I believe will be sufficient time, and also for the fact that we do not have internal knives, which will be very helpful in allowing us to make progress.

Finally, I can tell the Minister that although the amendments that I have tabled would constitute a substantial rewriting of the Bill, he should not assume that that indicates an intention ruthlessly to pursue such an objective. What I seek will become apparent: I wish to compare the relative complexity of what is proposed with the possible simplicity of an alternative. It was to highlight those two things that I thought it worth while tabling two brief amendments—one that would delete the rest of the Bill, and another that would give the Committee the chance to consider the possibility that there might be a better way to proceed. However, I am mindful of what the Minister said about the Government’s preferences in the matter.

Mr. Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD): I welcome you, Mr. Gale, to the Chair. It seems that you may be taking a headmasterly approach in your chairing of our meetings. I have not brought an apple today; I hope that it does not mean that I am out of order.

The Chairman: The hon. Gentleman will be relieved to know that I have not brought my cane.

Mr. Davey: I thought that such things had been outlawed.

I thank the Minister for his welcoming remarks. I and my hon. Friend the Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), who will bring a Scottish dimension to our scrutiny of the Bill, look forward to a constructive series of sittings.

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I am pleased that the hon. Member for Beaconsfield is on the Committee, not least because he has genuine expertise in the area, as we discovered on Second Reading. It is always good to serve on a Committee in the knowledge that at least one member has a detailed understanding. Lest the hon. Gentleman feels that that means we will bow to his authority, I assure him that we shall scrutinise his rewriting of the Bill, and the Bill itself, in equal detail. The Conservatives seemed on Second Reading to take a position that was very critical of the clumsiness of the Bill, and the hon. Gentleman made some trenchant remarks, but there was a hint of unwillingness to take action on the substantive point. We shall be interested to learn, when he tables his amendments, whether the Conservatives are interested in doing anything about the issue at stake.

Liberal Democrats certainly think that an offence of corporate manslaughter is needed. The Minister was right to say that there was a degree of consensus about that. We also feel, however, that the present proposals need to be significantly improved if we are to improve on the current legal position; I think that all hon. Members will know about its weaknesses. We particularly want to make sure that the Bill’s deterrent effect will work. The whole point of health and safety legislation and of putting an offence of this type on the statute book is to prevent accidents and deaths and to send out a clear signal. We shall judge the Bill and the amendments to it with that in mind.

I should like to welcome Labour Members to the Committee, because it is clear that they want to play an active part in the scrutiny of their Front Bench’s proposals. Judging by the amendments that they have tabled already, Mr. Gale, it appears that the Minister will be regaled—no pun intended—on all sides with efforts to ensure that the Bill fulfils its purpose. I hope that we can form some interesting cross-party coalitions, in the interest of the public.

Ian Stewart (Eccles) (Lab): Good morning, Mr. Gale. It is good to see you in the Chair—as it will be to see Mr. Benton, also. I have served under your chairmanship, and Mr. Benton’s, in previous Bill Committees; I enjoyed them and they were informative. I and my hon. Friends welcome the Bill. We heard it said on Second Reading by some commentators that the Bill does not itself do much, which is, I think, the reason for some of the amendments tabled by the official Opposition. I do not accept that. The Bill does improve the current situation. However, I and some of my hon. Friends accept that it can be improved. The purpose of our amendments and new clauses is to help in examining and probing the thinking behind the Bill, and to suggest ways of making it better.

The Chairman: I am always fascinated as Chairman by how few of the opening remarks have anything to do with the programme motion.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 1

Ian Stewart: I beg to move amendment No. 87, in page 1, line 3, leave out subsection (1) and insert—

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‘(1) An organisation to which this section applies is guilty of an offence if—

(a) the way in which any of its activities are managed or organised—

(i) causes a person’s death,

(ii) amounts to a gross breach of a relevant duty of care owed by the organisation to the deceased, and

(b) the gross breach could have been prevented had all reasonable precautions been taken and all due diligence been exercised by all those at a senior manager level within the organisation.’.

The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Amendment No. 34, in page 1, line 3, leave out from ‘if’ to end of line 5 and insert

‘a management failure by the organisation’.

Government amendments Nos. 1 to 4.

Amendment No. 35, in page 1, line 16, leave out paragraph (a).

Government amendment No. 5

Clause 2 stand part.

Amendment No. 76, in title, line 3, after ‘homicide;’, insert

‘to make provision for orders to encourage remedial action; to create an offence of causing death which was preventable by better corporate organisation or management;’.

I should perhaps, for clarification, explain why we are taking clause 2 stand part now. The group of amendments effectively relates to clause 2 as well as clause 1 and, were they to be carried, clause 2 would not exist.

As a matter of guidance to the Committee, those who have not served under my chairmanship before will probably be unaware that I am more than willing to have a stand part debate at the start of a clause, if that facilitates debate, rather than at the end, but I do not propose to have both. It is for the Committee to decide whether it would be beneficial to have a broad-ranging debate on a first group of amendments, which may be considerable—as this one is. That would be perfectly acceptable, on the strict understanding that you cannot have your cake and eat it later.

Ian Stewart: The amendment goes to the heart of what the Bill is intended to do, as identified by the Opposition and others. Currently, there can be individual responsibility for manslaughter, but as soon as we move on to address the corporate issue, a fundamental question arises: who represents the corporation? The corporation cannot be found guilty and put in prison. That is the core of the argument about the Bill and whether it is complete.

Subsection (1)(a) of the amendment is straightforward and speaks for itself; the company is guilty if activities “managed or organised” on its behalf cause a person’s death. Subsection (1)(b) of the amendment identifies the important concept of the relevant duty of care owed by the organisation, not only the individual, to anybody who has been killed. The “gross breach” has to be identified as having been preventable. That raises the question of who could have prevented it.

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Is the responsibility an individual or corporate one? The amendment seeks to introduce those concepts so that we can move on to establishing who would be responsible on behalf of the corporation. The concept of due diligence is important in identifying that corporate responsibility.

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Prepared 20 October 2006