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Health and Safety (Offences) Bill

It is a pleasure again to respond to the right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill). I think that we all hope that the powers in this Bill never have to be used, but that they will have a strong deterrent effect to ensure that our fellow citizens can go to work and come back at the end of the day without having been injured or, God forbid, killed. As the right hon. Gentleman said, 241 of our fellow citizens were killed at work in 2006-07, with another 30,000 suffering serious injuries and 100,000 other injuries. Although our health and safety record in this country is very good, as he said, we should note that the 2006-07 figures for fatalities sadly show a 17 per cent. increase on the year before, so there is no room for complacency. The right hon. Gentleman may be interested to know that worldwide there were some 355,000 workplace fatalities, according to the International Labour Organisation, half of which occurred in agriculture. Overall, we can take considerable credit from the fact that although we are the fifth largest economy, only 241 of those deaths—still too many—occurred in the United Kingdom. We have rehearsed the reasons why we need the Bill on Second Reading and in Committee. It is no part of my personal political philosophy to deny judges the powers that they berate this House for not having given them when it comes to serious cases in which people have been killed and injured, so I am pleased that we are giving the judges what they tell us they need. The Bill will also go some way towards reducing unwelcome bureaucracy and burdensome regulation, to which the McCrory report drew attention. We can say that this is a pro-business Bill, and we have to remember that it is businesses that pay all our salaries in this House. The Bill will also support those decent businesses that are already doing the right thing. It will stop them being undercut and ensure that they have a genuinely level playing field on which to operate. Some specific concerns remain, and I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for reading out his letter to the Sentencing Guidelines Council. He is right that both the CBI and Network Rail have remaining concerns. The CBI brief on the Bill comments that"““the enforcer’s choice of who to prosecute is often simply a matter of protocol or pressure from publicity””." I do not personally believe that to be the case, but I can understand why people who run businesses are worried. They need to try to make profits every day and they have many other things to worry about, so they do not want the unnecessary worry that they might wrongly end up in prison when they were not personally at fault. Network Rail made the reasonable point in its briefing that it trusts that"““imprisonment of an individual, in whatever capacity, is only a relevant possibility where there is personal fault””." Everything that I have heard from the right hon. Gentleman and from the Minister has reassured me and others with those concerns that that will be the case. However, the right hon. Gentleman did not enlighten us as to the response from the Sentencing Guidelines Council, although he said that he hoped that it would make work on this issue an urgent priority in its programme. Perhaps when the Minister responds, she will be able to update the House on whether she has had any communication with the council. If not, I hope that she can confirm that it will be an urgent priority for her Department, so that we can reassure people who still have some worries about the issue. My final point relates to the publicity campaign that the Department will need to run on this legislation. As I said earlier, we hope that the Bill will act as a deterrent, and will not need to be used, but it will have that effect only if people know about it. There is a tendency for Members of Parliament to think that the public hang on our every word, but the sad truth is that that is not the case. They have busy lives and do not always catch up with everything that we do. I hope that the Minister can tell me how the Department will inform businesses, small and large, about the Bill so that the deterrent effect works and the provisions never have to be used.