Corporate Homicide (Hansard, 18 April 2000)

§ Mr. Andrew Dismore (Hendon)

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to create a new offence of corporate killing to replace the offence of manslaughter in certain cases where death is caused without the intention of causing death or serious injury. My Bill has three purposes. The first is to create a new criminal offence of corporate killing. When the conduct of a company's management falls far below what can reasonably be expected, and is the cause or one of the causes of a person's death, that company must answer to the criminal courts. Secondly, if a company is convicted of corporate killing, the court should not only be able to punish the company severely, but have the power to order the company to put right the failings that were the cause of the death. Thirdly, the Bill would impose on the senior management of a company—its chairman and managing director—an overarching responsibility for the health and safety of its work force, and, equally important, for the health and safety of the general public.

Before becoming a Member of Parliament I practised as a personal injury lawyer, representing many families who had been bereaved by avoidable accidents. Most of those fatalities involved individuals—employees, motorists, pedestrians—and went unremarked in the press; but the feelings of loss and the sense of injustice suffered by the victims' families were just the same as those whom I helped who had lost loved ones in major incidents such as the Zeebrugge ferry disaster and the King's Cross fire.

Three days after that terrible tragedy at King's Cross, during my investigations on behalf of the bereaved and injured, I inspected what was left of the tube station. Nothing that I had previously experienced could have prepared me for the sights and smells of the fire's devastation. As I took statements from victims, distraught relatives, firefighters and tube staff, and as I sat through the public inquiry day after day hearing over and over again about the failures of the senior management of London Underground Ltd., it struck me as outrageous that neither the company nor any of its managers would face criminal proceedings over those 31 deaths. That was because of the inadequacies of the criminal law.

During his inquiry into the 192 deaths on the Herald of Free Enterprise, Mr. Justice Sheen said: All concerned in management, from the members of the board of directors down … are guilty of fault. From top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness … The failure on the part of … management to give proper and clear directions was a contributory cause of the disaster. However, the prosecution in the Zeebrugge case also collapsed owing to those same inadequacies of the criminal law—inadequacies highlighted by the more recent railway disasters: inadequacies that the Bill would rectify.

It is not just the headline-grabbing fires and rail crashes that concern me. In the last 10 years, more than 3,000 people have been killed at work, and hundreds of members of the public have met their deaths owing to corporate neglect. Only two companies have ever been successfully prosecuted for manslaughter. OLL Ltd. was convicted over the canoeing accident that killed four teenagers in Lyme Regis bay when they were swept out 832 to sea with inadequate clothing and equipment. The second case involved Jackson Transport, whose young employee, wearing only a boiler suit and with no other protective equipment, was drenched in a deadly chemical.

Those two convictions expose the absurdity of the law of corporate manslaughter as it currently stands. Corporate guilt rests entirely on proof of the individual guilt of a senior company officer. However reckless or grossly negligent the company as a whole may have been, it will escape conviction if no individual person—no "controlling mind" of the company—can be found guilty of manslaughter. The law is thus biased against small "one-man band" companies, in which it is easier to identify the individual manager or director who is to blame. Large companies escape because the accident is due not to the failure of an individual, but to the collective failure of the company's management systems. The bigger the company, the less chance there is of a successful prosecution.

I believe that only imposing duties on the most senior officers of a company will ensure that safety is given the same priority as profit. Safety awareness, and the great responsibility that it entails, should lie with those at the top—the chairman and managing director—and not with the employees, such as train drivers or ships' crews, who are always put up as the fall guys.

In 1996 the Law Commission recommended proposals for reform, including those advocated in the Bill. On 1 February this year, in its report on the work of the Health and Safety Executive, the Select Committee on the Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs recommended that the government brings forward legislation to introduce a crime of corporate killing as soon as possible. I know from answers that I have received to parliamentary questions that the Government have been considering the matter. After I gave notice of my Bill, I was pleased to read in The Sunday Telegraph this week that the Government expect to publish their proposals for consultation in the next few weeks.

The Bill would put the directors of companies that kill in the dock to answer for their actions and failings. If convicted, they would face not only the full rigours of the law, but the equally important power of the court to order them to put matters right for the future.

The Bill's purpose is not to bash responsible companies but to promote safety. Many companies do a good job, and look after their employees and the public properly. However, some do not, and they use loopholes in the law to escape their just desserts.

If we are to prevent further tragedies such as the Hillsborough disaster, the Clapham, Southall or Paddington train crashes and the Bradford City, King's Cross or Piper Alpha fires, tough new laws must be introduced. The Bill provides for that. Public confidence in industry and in the enforcement authorities suffers when the perpetrators of serious accidents escape prosecution on a legal technicality instead of having their culpability tested in court according to the standards that apply to a private individual on a charge of manslaughter. The Bill provides for that test, and I hope that the Government will accept it. The public expect nothing less from the Government, and I am sure that they will deliver.