9.24 pm
Mike Penning (Hemel Hempstead) (Con): Like many other hon. Members, I support the Bill. It goes a long way towards tackling the many anomalies that have occurred over the years. However, the Committee that considers it will have a difficult job.
Unlike many hon. Members who have spoken, I do not have a legal background. However, I have a partly trade union background. I cannot claim, like the hon. Member for Eccles (Ian Stewart), to have been born a trade union member, but I was a member of the Fire Brigades Union for many years, and I am proud to have been a member.
In that regard, I want to stress that one difficulty in the Bill has to do with Crown immunity. There is a difficult line to be drawn. I am sure that everyone in the House is proud of our firefighters and emergency services, but if we are not careful the people involved will think twice before they respond to an incident, such as rescuing someone from the ice, for example. They might not be worried about their own safety so much as about the safety of the officers who follow, because they might be held responsible in a court case if something goes wrong.
That is one example of how Crown immunity could cause a real problem, but the House will recall the explosion at the Buncefield facility in my constituency on 11 December last year. The HSE had inspected the depot two weeks before the explosion took place. I accept the many stories that we have heard today about how bad employers and companies did not do the work recommended after health and safety inspections, with the result that accidents happened and lives were lost, yet that is not true of Buncefield. I shall not pre-empt Lord Newton’s inquiry, but the evidence is that the HSE inspection found everything at the depot to be safe. Even so, two weeks later, every safety device there failed.
I am not a lawyer and have no legal background, but I am pretty sure that the Bill means that the HSE would be exempt from prosecution if it were found to be negligent. This afternoon, I asked the House of Commons Library to confirm that. It is a brilliant organisation, and it very quickly produced a document for me.
In its first paragraph, the document from the Library states that schedule 1 of the Bill would mean that the HSE would be liable to prosecution, but the next paragraph makes it clear that a judge would determine whether it owed a duty of care. This House should make such decisions: as we have heard already today, it is very dangerous to leave them to judges.
I welcome the Bill very much, on behalf of all workers and members of the public. However, the Minister and other hon. Members face a very difficult job in taking it through the House. The exemptions for Crown immunity go too far, especially as they apply to the Ministry of Defence—another subject about which I have a little knowledge, although I do not have time to go into detail now. On the other hand, we must be careful not to damage the ability of firefighters and the members of the other emergency services to do their jobs in the way that makes us all so proud.
I wish the Minister and the Committee luck. I look forward to seeing the Bill come back to the House.
9.28 pm
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