Speech Archives
Corporate Manslaughter Debate - 10 October, 2006.Mr.
Jimmy Hood (Lanark and Hamilton, East) (Lab): Like the hon. Member for
Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), I am not a lawyer,
but I have to say that if he had not told me that he was not, I would not have
known. He made a few valid points, some of which I agree with and some that I
do not.
All my adult life, I have championed the cause of
safety and health in the workplace. I was 23 years a miner, 14 of them as a
union official and a workman’s inspector. Safety and health is an inspirational
issue that has guided working class people in their trade unions and in their
representation in Parliament for the best part of a century. I recognise the
need for the Bill to be improved, but I welcome the fact that it will receive
its Second Reading tonight.
The Government are fulfilling the promise that
they made a few years ago. We would have preferred to have it sooner, but we
should not forget the good work of my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime
Minister in 2000, after disasters on the railways such as Hatfield. He
introduced culpable homicide legislation, and this is a further step on the way
that we should welcome.
For a lad brought up in a mining community, the
trauma of miners killed in pit disasters and gas explosions, and dying from
mining diseases, was commonplace. As a young boy, I saw my father come home too
many times from the pit to tell us that a workman had been killed. Sadly,
mining communities knew how to respond in solidarity to the loss of one of
their own, because it was all too common. Miners’ lives were a price that the
coal owners thought was worth paying for the pittance in wages that miners got
at the time.
On too many occasions as a mining union
official, I had to go and tell a wife that her husband and father of her
children would not be coming home. That personal experience influences
everything that I have said and done in this place for 20 years. I know, in my
heart of hearts, that had there been a law that told the director of the
colliery where I worked that he could be held personally
responsible for the loss of life, many of those mining disasters would have
been averted and a lot of lives saved. So I do not make anything small of this
important step. We will want to tweak and improve parts of the Bill, but it is
an important step.
For those in other parties who are less
enthusiastic in their support for the Bill, I shall end with a few words about
the 1999 Larkhall gas explosion. On the evening of 22
December 1999, a mother and father and their two children went to bed, looking
forward to Christmas. At 5.30 in the morning, their house was blown up in a gas
explosion and their lives were extinguished. That family—Drew and Janette
Findlay, with their two children, Stacey, 13 years old and Daryl, 11 years
old—was lost. The Home Secretary mentioned Transco, the corporation that was
held responsible for the explosion.
Nothing that I had experienced prepared me for
the trauma of that perplexing tragedy. It was not a workplace accident; it
happened in the sanctuary of a young couple’s home. A family with everything to
live for was taken from us by what we now know was a disaster that should not
have happened and would not have happened were it not for Transco’s corporate
negligence.
Transco was fined a record £15 million under
health and safety legislation. It was not convicted under Scots law of culpable
homicide—it got off on that. Fifteen million pounds is double the highest fine
in
It is no comfort to families who have lost their
loved ones to hear of fines to corporations. That would not give the
(For the full
debate on this Bill please refer to the Hansard on
the Parliament website www.parliament.uk)