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Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My Lords, I hope that your Lordships will forgive a very brief intervention. I have not taken part before because of other priorities. However, as a former Minister for police for a year, I have always thought that the police were properly responsible for the lives of any prisoners that they had in their custody. As Minister for the Prison Service for three years, it was clear to me that the Prison Service was responsible for the lives of the people who were entirely in its control. As an ex-Minister in a number of other departments, I am equally aware that if you do not put a date in a Bill you do not get it. The Government are always subject to the inertia imposed by the necessity to do other things on which there is a date, and the result is that those things on which there is not a date get put to the back of the queue indefinitely until the next election. The noble Baroness the Leader of the House shakes her head sadly at me. I can only say that I was in the job—I cannot interpret her mood, she is now wreathed in smiles. I hope that bodes well. If this House were to be content with something that could be interpreted worldwide as saying that the actual rights to life of our citizens are at their least when they are in the care of the state, it would say something about the state too horrible to contemplate.