---

Health and Safety (Offences) Bill

I shall leave to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) our chance to make these points in a different way. There is a substantial fear in our nation about any return to the kind of approach to this matter that was on offer before 1997. This law has been on the statute book since 1974. It would have been possible in 1981, 1982 or 1983—right through to 1997—to bring in the changes that my right hon. Friend proposes. The moment I hear about cross-party consensus, I tend to run for shelter, so perhaps I should say that it is also sad that it has taken 11 years for a Labour Government to find time for this Bill. The important point is that the Bill puts the onus on employers to think a little harder about health and safety. It will raise the maximum fine that the lower courts can impose to £20,000. It will allow both lower and higher courts to make imprisonment an option for most health and safety offences. The whole idea of law in our country, in any sphere in which it mandates behaviour, is that examples are set in the courts, and an example is worth a thousand pages of earnest health and safety leaflets sent out by the HSE and other organisations. The Bill will also give those concerned the chance to take certain offences from the lower courts to a higher level. If hon. Members had come with me to talk to those families who gathered in front of the Minster in Rotherham at the end of April, they would understand why those families would have liked this law to have been on the statute book some years ago. Health and safety is the most concrete and explicit way to create partnership in the workplace. I think of the former US Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, who served for a couple of years under President George W. Bush. Before becoming Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. O’Neill was the boss of Alcoa, the giant US-based global aluminium company. During his tenure as chief executive officer, he insisted that each year his managers had to report a certain percentage reduction in workplace health and safety incidents. If they did not, they were fired. The job of a subordinate manager is usually to report more sales, more profit or more market share, but Paul O’Neill wanted his managers to report as few deaths and accidents as possible. That approach massively improved the productivity and performance of the American aluminium industry. He saved that industry and, to some extent, the world aluminium industry by his leadership. He also found that the trade unions came to respect him and were prepared to reach agreements in other areas, such as wages and manning levels, that they might otherwise have resisted. When he became Secretary of the Treasury, he insisted that—[Interruption.]