§ 10.1 p.m.
§ Mr. George Thompson (Galloway)I beg to move Amendment No. 1, in page 1, line 11, leave out from 'employment' to 'or' in line 13.
§ Mr. Malcolm Rifkind (Edinburgh, Pentlands)On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it appropriate that this debate should continue in the absence of any Scottish Office Minister responsible for the Bill?
§ Mr. SpeakerI am not responsible for that matter. However, it looks as though the hon. Gentleman's prayer has now been answered.
§ Mr. ThompsonIt has been said that virtue lies between two extremes. If that is so, my hon. Friend the Member for Moray and Nairn (Mrs. Ewing) and I are doubly virtuous this evening, because to our own virtues we are adding the virtues of falling between two extremes. On the one hand we have the Lord Advocate, who said in Committee that we must have mandatory inquiries into every fatal accident at work. On the other hand we have the hon. Member for Edinburgh, Pent-lands (Mr. Rifkind), who wants only discretionary inquiries in all these cases.
I offer the Lord Advocate a middle way which seeks to maintain the status quo. This is a nice Conservative position which should attract support from all sides of the House. On the other hand, it is also a middle way which retains mandatory inquiries in respect of fatal industrial accidents and thereby meets the 1242 wishes of the Scottish TUC—a nice workers' position which should attract support on the Government Benches. It avoids providing mandatory inquiries for employers and self-employed persons who have not asked for this provision. I maintain that it is an excellent compromise between the two extreme positions and will cut costs, since mandatory inquiries will not be increased in number while juries are dispensed with altogether.
This does not go as far as the Grant Committee wanted to go, but it makes much better provision than the Government make in the Bill. It also does justice to the legitimate desires of the STUC. I offer it to the House in a spirit of conciliation, seeking to set the feet of the Lord Advocate and of the hon. Member for Pentlands in the way of peace. I commend the amendment to the House.
§ Mr. RifkindWe are grateful to the hon. Member for Galloway (Mr. Thompson) for introducing his amendment so lucidly and clearly.
Before I deal with the amendment, I must comment on the disgraceful absence from the Government Front Bench of any Minister responsible for the Bill when the matter was first called by the Chair. It is unfortunate on such an occasion that, during the first few minutes, the only Scottish Office Minister present in the House had played no part in the proceedings on the Bill. That is an unfortunate example for the House.
The amendment is a strange provision coming from the hon. Member for Galloway. The House can easily understand arguments directed to the need for a mandatory inquiry or to the belief of many of us that inquiries should be discretionary and that the Lord Advocate should determine the matter in the light of the circumstances of the case.
The House will find it difficult to understand the curious argument of the hon. Member for Galloway that some kinds of fatal accidents concerned with employment should result in mandatory inquiries while others should not. His only criteria for distinguishing between them is whether they arise from employment or whether the deceased was self-employed. But perhaps I am being too generous in suggesting that there is an intelligent basis for the distinction.
1243 Those of us who served on the Committee with the hon. Member are well aware of the real basis for his position. He made it clear in all his speeches on the matter that on the merits of the case he is at one with my hon. Friends that inquiries should be discretionary, that mandatory inquiries serve no useful purpose and that the Grant Committee was correct in rejecting them.
§ Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Myer Galpern)Order. The hon. Gentleman should not try to resuscitate an amendment which has not been selected for discussion. He should confine himself to this amendment.
§ Mr. RifkindI fully accept your ruling, Mr Deputy Speaker, but it is necessary to point out the distinction between the amendment which the hon. Member for Galloway has moved and his previous comments on the subject of mandatory inquiries for the self-employed and for employed persons. The hon. Gentleman has not yet satisfied anyone on either side of the basis of the distinction which he wishes to draw, other than that the Scottish Trades Union Congress has requested that such a distinction be made and that he has fallen in with that request.
The House should reject the amendment because it is basically dishonest and artificial. It is not based on reason, intelligence or genuine concern for the interests of fatal accident inquiries. It is a spurious amendment which does not comply with the wishes of those concerned or the attitude of those involved in the work of inquiries.
The Government should be congratulated at least on trying to end the artificial distinction between one form of employment and another. The amendment seeks to maintain an artificial distinction. I shall be interested to hear what the hon. Member for Moray and Nairn (Mrs. Ewing) has to say. On Second Reading the hon. Lady appeared, from her seated interventions, to support my view. I shall resume my seat in the hope of hearing whether she has changed that view.
§ The Lord Advocate (Mr. Ronald King Murray)I apologise to the House and to the hon. Member for Galloway (Mr. Thompson) for not being at the 1244 Dispatch Box when the debate began. I regret that the hon. Member for Edinburgh, Pentlands (Mr. Rifkind) raised that matter in such a provocative way. I hope that if he is 30 seconds late on some future occasion more tolerance will be extended to him. Sometimes it is difficult to get into the House when Members are rushing out, and that was the reason for my absence.
The hon. Member for Galloway moved his amendment temperately and I hope to answer him in a convincing way. The effect of his amendment is to restrict mandatory inquiries to cases where an employee is killed. There would be no mandatory inquiry when an employer or self-employed person was killed. The amendment is not acceptable to the Government because it goes against the consistent approach in the Bill.
We should be equally concerned with the safety of the whole of the work force and not draw unnecessary and unreasonable distinctions. It is not desirable to discriminate between employees on one hand and employers and the self-employed on the other hand. No such distinction is drawn in other legislation relating to safety at work, notably the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. The amendment would therefore lead to a discrepancy in approach between the Bill and other legislation in the same area, and that would not be desirable.
The reference to employers is not an innovation. The Fatal Accidents Inquiry (Scotland) Act 1895, which is presently in operation, applies to employers equally with employees. Therefore, it is only the reference to the self-employed that is new.
I should like to consider some of the objections to the inclusion of new categories, for the benefit of the hon. Gentleman putting particular emphasis on the self-employed. It is tempting to argue that people's safety, particularly that of the self-employed, is in their own hands. It can be said that the self-employed are their own masters and that if they do not take enough care it is the concern of no one else and is not a public concern. But that is to over simplify the issue.
There may frequently be cases where it is very much in the public interest to determine the cause of death of an employer or self-employed person—for 1245 example, if someone is killed as a result of a defect in a piece of machinery. It does not matter whether the person killed is self-employed, an employer or an employee. It is the defect and its consequences that matter. Equally, if an employer in a small concern working alongside his employees is killed as a result of a defect in the system of work, it is in the public interest to ascertain what is wrong with the system irrespective of the status of the person killed.
It should also be borne in mind that there are many work situations in which the safety of someone who is technically self- employed depends upon others. For example, on a construction site the safety of a self-employed sub-contractor may well depend on arrangements made by the main contractor and other sub-contractors. When domestic repairs are being carried out in one's own house, a self-employed electrician may be working alongside plumbers one of whom is the boss and two or three of whom are his employees. An explosion resulting from the work would have the same impact on any of them. It would be a technicality that they were there in slightly different capacities.
Similarly, self-employed persons such as window cleaners would rightly come under this provision. Self-employed divers might be employed in the North Sea, and they would obviously be properly covered by the provision. I could give more examples, but those I have already given show how unrealistic it is to draw an artificial distinction between the employer and employee on the one hand and the self-employed on the other.
The hon. Member for Pentlands made much of the question of numbers. It is clear that employers and the self-employed are a very small proportion of the work force. Therefore, there need be no fears on that score.
For those reasons, I hope that the hon. Member for Galloway will not insist on his amendment. If he does, I invite the House to reject it.
§ Mr. ThompsonI thank the Lord Advocate for what he has said.
I should like to say a word in reply to the hon. Member for Edinburgh, Pent-lands (Mr. Rifkind). The Lord Advocate, the hon. Gentleman and I are well aware that part of the reason for my moving the amendment on Report was the discussions 1246 in Committee, which were a little lively. I felt it right to move an amendment which would show, I hope conclusively, that, as befits my Christian name, I had ploughed a very straight furrow the whole way through.
I do not think that the position is quite as strange as the hon. Gentleman made it out to be, because that is the present position until the Bill becomes law. I take the point that the Lord Advocate made about the self-employed, but I would have thought that in cases of deaths of the self-employed it would have been sufficient for him to institute a discretionary inquiry. However, in view of the response which I have had from the Government on the matter, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
§ Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.