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Health and Safety (Offences) Bill

My hon. Friend makes more than one point; he makes two points. The first is that it is especially tragic when young people are maimed, injured or killed at work, particularly when they are on work experience. As I recall from our proceedings on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, there was one case in which somebody was killed on their very first day at work. That case shows—although my hon. Friend’s example perhaps illustrates this rather better—that employers owe a particular duty to people with no work experience to speak of who are put in an alien environment and face hazards that they were never aware of before. Indeed, without the appropriate training and proper health and safety precautions being taken, they might not even appreciate the fact that they are in a hazardous environment. My hon. Friend’s first point is therefore about a class of people who need particular protection under the 1974 Act. My hon. Friend’s second point is about what happens to the prosecution if the employer is not worth a bean. The answer to that is in the Bill: the employer may not be worth a bean, but he can still be locked up if the court concludes that the offence is sufficiently serious to warrant a term of imprisonment. Ultimately, the Health and Safety Executive would have to form a view, based on the facts of the case, on whether the employer was worth prosecuting, because the decision on the penalty is a matter not for the prosecution, but for the magistrate or the Crown court judge on conviction. The Health and Safety Executive could take the view that the court would be unlikely to impose a custodial sentence, but it would still have the opportunity of a suspended sentence and the range of similar penalties that flow from that. However, I would hope that the availability of a heavier sentence, involving custody, would be an incentive for the Health and Safety Executive to prosecute those cases that would previously not have been worth the candle. My hon. Friend therefore makes an important point. Before my hon. Friend’s intervention, I was talking about the problem of rogue companies and how the Bill will act as an additional deterrent against them. The difficulty is that the rogue company cuts its costs and undercuts good employers by providing the same goods at a cheaper price, but at the expense of its workers. That is another reason why the additional penalties are so important. They will enable the good employer to compete on a more level playing field against those who take the risk at the expense of their workers.