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Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

The hon. Gentleman started his remarks by saying that we would not be discussing the Bill if the existing law had worked well. In that, he is, of course, right, but does he accept that what went wrong in the past was the fact that it was difficult to establish the responsibility of companies because of the controlling mind principle? That was the problem that the Bill was designed to deal with, and I believe that it is doing it rather well. Is not the danger of the approach favoured by the hon. Gentleman and other Labour Members that we forget that a criminal sanction has to be applied to an individual and that the standard of proof to which those individual must be held ought properly to be very high; otherwise, we will find ourselves in very dangerous territory? Is not the hon. Gentleman’s approach effectively addressing the wrong problem with the wrong solution?