---

Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

moved Amendment No. 30: 30: Clause 9 , page 8, line 17, leave out ““order it”” and insert ““make an order (a ““remedial order””) requiring the organisation”” The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, in moving government Amendment No. 30 I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 32 to 35 in the group and resist Amendments Nos. 31 and 36. Clause 9 gives the court the power to order the convicted organisation to remedy not only the management failure and any matters arising from that failure that formed the basis of the conviction but also to remedy any deficiencies in the policies, systems and practices that created the environment in which the fatality could occur. The purpose of those orders will be to prevent further death or injury and it is clearly important that organisations comply with remedial orders when they are set. To this end, we have made the consequences of not complying with an order more serious than was the case in the draft Bill. Organisations which do not comply will be committing an offence and will be returned to the Crown Court where they will be subject to an unlimited fine. We have also provided that the regulatory authorities will be involved in the setting of an order and are confident that these bodies will ensure that safe practices are adopted in organisations convicted of corporate manslaughter. We can, however, see a case for building in a process for facilitating such monitoring and we have therefore tabled Amendment No. 34 which allows the court to require an organisation to provide evidence of compliance to any enforcement authority that was consulted prior to the order being set. That goes back some way to the question put to me by the noble Lord on the last amendment. I hope the House will agree that the benefit here is that the provision builds in an extra safeguard to ensure that convicted organisations always do carry out any remedial action ordered by the court. The other government amendments are technical changes to the drafting which make no substantive changes to the Bill. I know that my noble friend Lady Turner of Camden has tabled amendments designed to ensure that remedial orders are complied with. I am interested to hear what she will say about them, so I will postpone my comments on those until she has had a chance to speak to them. I beg to move.