Its been under consideration for over a decade but the Government has finally published its Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill.
The Bill applies to Scotland as well as England and Wales – the difference is that the offence in Scotland will be corporate homicide whereas in England and Wales it will be corporate manslaughter.
Under current law a company can only be convicted of corporate manslaughter if there is enough evidence to find a single senior person guilty. This does not reflect the reality of modern corporate life and to date, only seven small organisations have been convicted.
The proposed new criminal offence addresses this key deficit by enabling the courts to consider the overall picture of how an organisation’s activities were managed by its senior managers, rather than focusing on the actions of one individual.
An organisation will be guilty of the new offence if someone has been killed as a result of the gross failure of an organisation’s senior managers to:
It will also cover organisations providing goods and services to members of the public, the construction, use or maintenance of infrastructure or vehicles, or when operating commercially.
The bill also takes the unprecedented step of lifting Crown immunity for the first time. Crown bodies – such as Government departments – as well as other public sector organisations including police forces will be on an equal footing with the private sector when carrying out similar activities.
The new offence will be clearly linked to the standards required under existing health and safety laws. It will not apply to circumstances where an organisation does not owe a duty of care or to certain public and government functions whose management involve wider questions of public policy and are already subject to other forms of accountability.
For example, it will not apply to strategic decisions about the spending of public money or activities like statutory inspection, holding prisoners in detention, the response of the emergency services, policing or child protection.
Some further refining of the areas that the new offence will not cover will be done during the bill’s passage through Parliament together with refinements to the definition of management failings.
If a company is found guilty of corporate manslaughter the penalty will be an unlimited fine. The bill also gives the courts power to impose a remedial order which can already be imposed for health and safety offences and requires the company to address the cause of the fatality.
Home Office minister Gerry Sutcliffe said: “The UK has a very strong health and safety record. This is not about changing standards or imposing extra burdens on business but supporting well managed companies by targeting those who are cutting costs and taking unjustified risks with people’s safety.
“For too long the law has made it extremely difficult to bring to justice large companies whose management failure has resulted in death.”
The new bill has been broadly welcomed by both the TUC and the CBI but TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said he would like to see specific health and safety duties for directors.
