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Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

May I raise one small point which is meant to be helpful to the Government? The Minister has set out a series of rigid lines: the law of tort as opposed to the law of contract; the common law as opposed to statute; and the common law of negligence as opposed to various other sources. We are not here concerned with the breach of the duty; we are concerned with its source. The Minister will know as well as I do—I remember a previous Bill when this point was raised with him—that Ministers’ statements can have a serious effect on the way in which a court looks at the statute. Are the Government, for the final time, really taking this line based on a series of curious legal frontiers, or will the Minister think about it again? If he says that the Government will think about this again, it might not have that elevated status that would enable counsel to confuse the court by these lines in relying on Ministers’ statements.