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Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My Lords, I shall see whether my arguments lack traction. I will try to deal with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. Before I do perhaps I should set the amendment in context. The amendment to the clause requires us to do that. The purpose of the clause is to make it clear that a narrow range of organisations will not be liable to prosecution for corporate manslaughter regarding actions that they take in response to emergency circumstances. That means that matters such as the time taken for the emergency services to arrive on scene, the number of personnel determined to attend, and the effectiveness of how the emergency situation is handled are excluded from the ambit of the offence. The value of this exemption is that it gives clarity to the emergency services about where their liabilities for manslaughter lie. In most circumstances the organisations listed would not owe a duty of care in terms of their responses to emergencies; so even without the exemption they would not be subject to this offence. There are some situations where that would be open to question. It could lead to uncertainty in the emergency services and could encourage a culture of undue risk aversion. That would not be in the public interest. The amendment tabled in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, seeks to widen the extent of this exemption. At present, the exemption applies only to organisations that are, in effect, providing a public service when responding to emergency circumstances. But as I think the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, noted in Committee, this is not limited to public authorities. Commercial and other organisations are covered by the exemption where they are effectively standing in for a public authority. The exemption also applies to a range of other organisations such as Mountain Rescue and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, which are not part of the public sector but, as we all understand, effectively perform a public role and a public duty. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, proposes that we should go further than this and exempt all organisations employing firefighters or protecting life and property in the event of a fire or responding to other emergency circumstances. As I understand it, his argument is that private and public bodies face exactly the same risks at the scene of an emergency and so they should benefit from the same protection from liability. I agree that the task of responding to an emergency such as a fire presents the same challenges for either public or private firefighters, but this exemption is not only about the management of difficult emergency situations involving split-second decisions taken at the scene of an emergency; it is also directed at wider issues such as the time it takes the emergency services to arrive on scene and the number of personnel deployed. It is in relation to liability for decisions about the management and allocation of resources that we think there is a difference between organisations providing services solely on a commercial basis and those subject to wider public considerations. Unlike commercial operators, the statutory Fire Service does not choose to offer fire-fighting capacity on a contractual basis and it cannot withdraw its services from the market if it finds its resources are overstretched. By contrast, commercial organisations can choose the terms of the contract with the client and on that basis agree the service that they are able to supply. They can also withdraw their services if there is a risk that resources could not be matched to demand. If, therefore, a commercial organisation fails grossly negligently to meet the terms of the contract, we are not persuaded that it would be right to exempt it from liability. It is also worth bearing in mind how duties of care appear to fall in the common law. The courts have recognised that public rescue authorities do not usually owe duties of care in respect to the way they respond to emergencies, but it is not at all clear that the same considerations apply in respect of private companies providing services on a contractual basis. We have therefore taken the approach that where private organisations are effectively performing a public role, their liability should be comparable to that of public rescue authorities, but the Bill does not otherwise remove existing liabilities for manslaughter. Having heard some of the arguments we prepared earlier, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.