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Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

I hope to do that. I am grateful for that intervention and the hon. Gentleman’s involvement throughout the Bill’s passage. I am trying to express the fact that we think that the role of the prisons and probation ombudsman will need time to develop in the way in which we have outlined. We will deliver the new role through the next appropriate legislative vehicle. Secondly, in response to the Lords amendments and the hope expressed in the Lords that applying the offence to deaths in custody would reduce such deaths, we have decided to review the role of the forum for preventing deaths in custody. That independently chaired forum, on which Baroness Stern sits as an observer from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, brings together practitioner and inspectorial professionals from across the relevant services involved in detention for which the Ministry of Justice, Home Office and Department of Health are responsible. The forum’s remit is to compare and contrast approaches, and to identify and draw attention to good practice and issues that require further attention from the services or from Ministers. The forum is working well and is meeting many of the criteria that the Joint Committee set out in its recommendations for a taskforce. I believe that it has great potential to bring about real changes and improvements to safety in custody, but I acknowledge that there is room for improvement of the forum; we need to give it greater autonomy from Government, and increase its capacity for sharing information and conducting research. We will review the forum, but it is too early to say exactly how it may change. However, we will consider issues such as resourcing, capacity and the interaction between Ministers and the forum. In terms of time scale, we have already started to consider how we might strengthen the forum. I hope that the two measures that I have mentioned demonstrate our strong commitment to reducing deaths in custody and to ensuring that each death receives proper investigation. However, as the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright) pointed out, we are also proposing amendments in lieu of the Lords amendments. By doing that, we are acknowledging the strength of feeling expressed in Parliament about duties to people in custody, and concerns about the fact that those duties were not included in the Bill. We propose giving the Secretary of State power to amend the Bill by affirmative resolution to increase the categories of duty of care. Although the power that we are proposing does not bring custody into the Bill, it leaves the door open to doing so, without primary legislation, in future.