---

Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I am very much obliged to the noble Lord for drawing attention to this fact. In many civil cases, the limitation period will be extended. That is the reason why I gave the illustrations of when it would be, but that is the very reason why I am not tying the limitation period to a specific period of six years, I am tying it to what would be the limitation period in civil cases. That may, as the noble Lord has pointed out, be extended for various reasons where, for one reason or another, the negligence has not, or could not be, discovered, and it may be much longer than the six years. But that there should be a limitation period seems to me to be in the highest public interest. Perhaps I may mention one other thing, which I should have mentioned. The whole idea of limitation is not—in case it might otherwise be thought—an idea of the judges; it was something on which Parliament has insisted for, I would think, many hundreds of years. The noble Lord is a better legal historian than I, but I would think that the first limitation provision was certainly laid in the seventeenth century. So this is not a new idea of the judges; it is something that Parliament has always insisted on.