---

Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill

My Lords, I would not wish to find myself against the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and I am not at all surprised that his persistence has borne fruit in the way that it has. I am very grateful to the Lord President for the way in which she has spoken. If we are at the end of a process, that itself must be a good thing. However, she said one thing about which I should like to voice a word of concern. If I understood correctly, she said that one reason why it was important that we did not put a timetable into the Bill was that the service or services might have difficulty adjusting to what the Bill requires. If I heard her correctly, she went on to say that the concern was about not the senior levels of the service but the junior levels. When I heard her say that, I thought, ““Yes, I know what you mean, and it is what we often say, but it is an argument about which we should be extremely cautious””. If, in some meeting of bishops, I catch myself saying that of course I agree with something but I could not possibly expect people back home to go along with it, I always know that I am on a difficult wicket. The task of legislation and, if I may say so, of government and senior levels in the service is to set an ethos that is absolutely clear. If that happens, it enables change, but change does not happen if people at the lower levels of institutions suspect that secretly the people at the higher levels are not very committed to the change. Time and again, I have seen people of great vulnerability cared for in places only because a very clear policy has been set by the people in charge. I only hope that this possibility of delay is not wrongly attributed to people at a lower level but that we who have the opportunity to form an opinion about this matter make the ethos that we require absolutely clear. I am sure that that is true of the Lord President, but that form of argument needs to be noticed when it is brought into play.