---

Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

It is for the hon. Gentleman to decide whether I make a bad or a good point. I am trying to explain our view of the situation surrounding custody in the context of the Bill. I am sure that he will accept that the Government have moved a long way to try to resolve the issue. I will develop my theme further, and I am sure that if he thinks the bad points are getting worse he will intervene again. However, I think that there is a distinction to be made in relation to the police. There are questions about whether applying the offence to custody would have unintended and unwanted consequences in the form of risk aversion, which we discussed in Committee. We have always argued that risk aversion can be greater in the public sector, where there is not the drive of profit to balance against it. That is especially true in high-risk areas, of which custody is undoubtedly one. Would applying the offence mean, for example, that the police would be less likely to pick up a drunk lying in the street—perhaps for that person’s own good—given that there would be no liability until the person were held in a cell? Finally, there is a point that has been made several times while discussing this subject: Government policy is fundamentally linked to the custodial environment. Separating policy from its implementation is very difficult when the two are so closely aligned, such as in the case of the provision of resources to prisons to make cells safer and the management of those resources locally. A question on whether sufficient money had been spent on a particular cell would go right back to the decision taken in government about the amount of resources that should have been allocated. Questions about the way in which resources were allocated and whether they were sufficient are not for the courts to consider. The recommendations from the Joint Committee on Human Rights included increasing funding throughout the prison estate. Although it is right for the Joint Committee to make such recommendations—that is its role—it is certainly not the role of the courts to decide how taxpayers’ money should be spent.