Lord Roe of West Wickham (Lab)

My Lords, I did not intend to speak to this group of amendments as I am here to support a Labour amendment concerning the independent public advocate. But, after listening to the debate, and having gone through two rounds of public inquiry and having led a very large organisation that was rightly put into two different kinds of special measures—through our inspectorate and through the aegis of a specially set up ministerial board to hold us to account on the basis of a public inquiry—I think these are really important amendments. This in an important group of amendments to support, because there should be as many different levers as possible to encourage both senior people and junior operational people inside big, high-risk endeavours to take decisions, even it if is difficult, in the light of logical systems of decision-making. The reason I say this is that we are approaching the issue from the point at which something has gone wrong. If these amendments pass, they will start to address some of the issues that might stop things going wrong in the first place. It would almost force organisations to train their people better in decision-making, record-keeping and applying systems, so that even if something goes very wrong—and I have worked my entire life in occupations where you can do the right thing morally or take what seems on the face of it the right decision in the moment, based on the information you have, and still get it desperately wrong, sometimes with fatal consequences—they understand that telling the truth is going to protect the reputation of the organisation in the longer term. In my experience it does, when you come clean. Secondly, you do not just have an incentive in the context of consequence; you understand that, if you can justify your logic, having recorded it at the time, and you have taken a decision in good faith, you should not fear criminal sanction, because the reality of criminal law—and I understand this, even though I am definitely not a lawyer, because I have spent so much time in this space—is that it will not apply to you, because you have done all the things you reasonably could with the information you had. If you are not in that position, I am afraid you probably have to accept an element of either criminal negligence or something more pernicious. We should not seek to excuse or present a foil for that. I thought that I would make that point when I was sitting here listening because, having been in that position, I think this is a very important group of amendments that I certainly support. I have thought about them and been challenged by them.