Unions lobby over corporate homicide bill

STUC leaders yesterday joined MSP Karen Gillon MSP to lobby Home Office minister Gerry Sutcliffe and Scottish Labour MPs to demand changes in the Corporate Homicide Bill, due to be debated in the House of Commons today.

The STUC has taken its campaigning operation to Westminster following withdrawal, on the advice of the then Lord Advocate Lord Boyd, of Gillon's Scottish Parliament private member's bill intended to strengthen the law to make employers criminally liable for the deaths of workers where negligence can be proved.

The STUC is now pressing for amendments to the UK parliament's Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, which receives its second reading in the Commons today.

Ian Tasker, the STUC's assistant secretary, stressed that the union leaders did not accept the Lord Advocate's decision to withdraw a bill which, he said, would have ensured that there was "no hiding place" for so-called corporate killers. He added: "The government has to accept we will not support any legislation that does not deliver a consistent approach to all offences of involuntary culpable homicide.

"As it stands, the corporate homicide bill falls far short of what we want to achieve through changes in the common law offence of culpable homicide."

The STUC believes the proposed legislation does not go far enough in making individual directors and management criminally liable for the deaths of their employees, a move that employers groups such as the CBI have condemned as leading to "witch-hunts".