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Health and Safety (Offences) Bill

I am again grateful to my hon. Friend, who raises an extremely important point. My response is to say, first, that we hope to be able to provide a further set of explanatory notes to deal with the extension of the Bill’s application to Northern Ireland before it proceeds elsewhere. Secondly, there are one or two fairly minor differences between the schedule applying to Great Britain set out in the Bill and the schedule that will form part of the amended Northern Ireland order. I hope to identify those differences in due course, if my hon. Friend will exert the patience for which he is famous in these precincts. The power to impose a fine of up to £20,000 is available already, in respect of some of the offences under the 1978 order, such as breaches of the general duties on employers arising under articles 4 to 7. However, the current maximum penalty for specific breaches of health and safety regulations, which may be just as serious as breaches of general duties—exactly the sorts of issues to which my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, South (Ms Butler) alluded—is a £5,000 fine, hence the extension to the new maximum of £20,000. Secondly, these amendments serve to make imprisonment an option for most health and safety offences in both the lower and the higher courts. At present, imprisonment is an option only in certain cases—for failure to comply with an improvement or prohibition notice or court remedy order or, in the High Court only, for failure to comply with licensing requirements, explosive provisions or disclosure of information in breach of the 1978 order. These amendments will extend the option of a custodial sentence to a greater range of offences, thus responding to the fact that in several cases over the years judges have remarked on the lack of imprisonment as an option and have said that they would have jailed the offender had they been able to do so.