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Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Henley, for the way in which he has moved the amendment. I accept that noble Lords opposite have moved on from their earlier position on this matter and have adopted what one can fairly describe as a more novel approach. Clause 5 provides exemptions for the police when they are engaged in operational activities. The exemption also extends to other public authorities that engage in policing activities. Our starting point for this exemption was to look at the situations where the civil courts have decided to impose duties of care on the police. The civil courts have exercised great caution over making judgments about how and when the police should have acted. Having considered this carefully, we took the view that they were right and followed that in framing the exemption in the Bill. The exemption in subsection (3), which the amendment tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Hunt and Lord Henley, would remove, excludes policing and law enforcement activities generally, but does not exclude duties owed as employer and occupier in those circumstances. The civil courts have taken a cautious approach to extending duties of care to the police when they are engaged in operational activities; for example, they have declined to extend duties of care to situations where the police have failed to catch serial killers. We believe corporate manslaughter merits a similarly cautious approach. There are two main reasons why the courts have been cautious: first, that the courts may be ill-equipped to judge certain decisions; and, secondly, that to expose the police to liability for decisions about police operations could seriously distort their priorities. Those arguments are especially relevant to the type of case where the police are being called to account for a failure to protect the public from violent people. For example, in such a circumstance, the courts would have to consider all the reasons why the police did not act, including weighing up the relative seriousness of the other operations that the police were dealing with at the time and whether the police had correctly prioritised their staff and resources. We do not think that the courts have the right levelof expertise to engage in that sort of evaluation, especially where there are no objective standards by which to measure issues such as health and safety. We are also concerned that the imposition of liability for manslaughter might make police forces act in an overly defensive way. The issue of being risk averse was made in an earlier debate by the noble Lord, Lord Imbert. This could result in a shifting of priorities to crimes where injury to the public might occur, no matter how slight the injury or how small the risk; for example, from dealing with burglaries to attending every incident of a threat to kill, no matter how unlikely the threat. I recognise that these arguments carry particular force when considering holding the police to account for failures to prevent killings, where the label of manslaughter would also seem especially inapt. However, we do not think it is straightforward to distinguish this type of policing operation from another where the case for an exemption may be less strong—errors of commission rather than omission. The police do not engage in operational activities except when fulfilling duties to protect the public and enforce the law, where operational choices need to be fairly made. Targeting proactive errors rather than failures might encourage the police to prefer inaction over decisive intervention. We do not want that, so we have drawn a clear line around all policing and law enforcement activities and carefully excluded them from the scope of the offence. The noble Lords propose an alternative solution that would ensure juries take into account the particular circumstances the police find themselves in—including the nature of the operation, resource constraints that applied at the time and other public interest considerations—when assessing whether a breach has been gross. Although this might in some respects appear an attractive proposition, it is not practical or realistic to expect the prosecution to be able to put before the courts all the considerations that the police had to take into account when balancing their resources in order to deal with any particular incident. Nor would such a solution give the police the clarity they need in terms of when the offence will apply to them. We have been careful to ensure that potential defendants are clear about the circumstances in which they may become liable for this offence. For the police, there are circumstances where no duty of care would be found by a civil court but the position under the criminal law would be uncertain. This very uncertainty could lead the police to act in a risk-averse way, with all the attendant dangers. On the amendment about hazardous training, the police have to undergo the hazardous training to prepare for dealing with serious disorder. The example used in Grand Committee was where the police experience real petrol bombing in training to deal with riots. The police must be able to experience that sort of training to fully prepare them for the unfortunate but occasional events which exist as a real threat on our streets. That does not mean, however, that all hazardous training undertaken by the police should be excluded from the offence. As the noble Lord, Lord Henley, pointed out in Grand Committee and this evening, there is an agreement between ACPO and the Health and Safety Executive about how the HSE’s role in police hazardous training generally operates. In general, hazardous training should come under the offence, and as the Bill is drafted it will do so. To take two examples from the Met Police’s book of remembrance for officers, two officers are recorded as having died in the course of training in the past30 years. In one case, an officer drowned during underwater search training and, in the other, an officer was killed in a car crash during training with the stolen vehicle unit. In both cases the training was indeed of a hazardous nature. However, neither case would have been excluded on the basis of this exemption because, while hazardous, it was not being carried out to improve effectiveness in dealing with terrorism and other similarly serious circumstances. This sort of training will often be focused on enabling officers to carry out hazardous activities as safely as possible in the circumstances, through evaluating risks and making decisions about whether to continue the activity. The difference between this type of training and riot training is about the extent to which the training environment can be controlled and yet realistic. Officers involved in riots cannot decide to stop because it has become too dangerous, so riot training will be in a less controlled environment. The use of real petrol bombs will also mean that outcomes are less predictable. We do not want the police and other law enforcers to undertake training which is artificial and avoids risky situations so that the first time the police experience a riot is in a genuine riot. That would be counter-productive and put officers at greater risk because they will be unprepared for dangers. To summarise, the offence is fundamentally about the proper management of health and safety, not the adequacy of the way public bodies discharge their statutory responsibilities. That is not, of course, to argue that police decisions are always right. They may and do get things wrong. When they do, they canbe held to account by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, independent inquiries and, of course, through the tripartite arrangements with police authorities and the Home Secretary. Individual officers are also fully subject to the criminal law, but extending criminal liability over operational matters to the police as a body is unnecessary and could distort policing priorities in a damaging and counter-productive way. For those reasons, we continue to resist the noble Lord’s amendment, clever though it is.