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Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My Lords, we have all missed the presence of the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, throughout this process. At the outset of the debate in Grand Committee, I passed to her a copy of the test cases which I wished to use as examples of how the Bill might apply in practice. She honoured me with a reply, for which I am deeply grateful, in which she made specific reference to one of those cases. Her reply is worth reading because it underlines the confusions that even the noble Baroness herself can see in this, which could lead in time to the Bill being regarded as an unjust arrangement in the eyes of the public. In her reply, the noble Baroness referred to my example F, the case I postulated of a racecourse with a fence which is known to be particularly dangerous if horses jump into a setting sun and, therefore, asa regular practice it is ““dolled off””. But on one occasion, it is not dolled off and the fatality of a jockey occurs. In regard to example F, the noble Baroness said that, "““the Clerk of the Course may owe a duty of care to jockeys, but his personal duty of care could not give rise to a corporate manslaughter prosecution—the duty of care must be owed by an organisation to the deceased. Similarly, the duties of the board””—" of the racecourse— "““to the jockeys cannot give rise to a corporate manslaughter charge, but the duties owed by the organisation which they run could. In practice, there may be an overlap between personal duties owed and those owed by the organisation. Individual duties of care may give rise to questions of manslaughter under the current law of gross negligence manslaughter under which individuals may be liable, whereas organisational duties may give rise to questions of corporate manslaughter””." Given the state of confusion which exists even in the mind of the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, how can the wider public possibly perceive the justice of pinning imprisonment on anyone? There are at least five candidates in that particular case—the man who forgot to put the dolling around the fence; the groundsman; the clerk of the course; the chairman or chief executive of the racecourse; and, beyond that, what used to be the Jockey Club but is now the British Horseracing Authority. Some of those might look juicy targets to go for but, on the other hand, to go for any of them would look completely ridiculous in the eyes of the public.