Police pile on the pressure in corporate killing enquiries

Louis Wustemann | News | HSP
06.11.2008

Police are arresting managers at their workplaces as part of corporate manslaughter investigations, according to a defence lawyer involved in two of the first deaths being investigated under the new Act.

Paul Burnley of DLA Piper warned that in the cases he is involved in, police have arrested supervisors, site-level managers and directors and interviewed them under caution within weeks of the incident.

Speaking at the second joint IIRSM and HSW safety conference in Birmingham on 5 November, Burnley said that he had been surprised by the rigour of the investigations compared with those into fatalities in the past.

He noted that investigators are counting site staff as senior management for the purposes of the Corporate Manslaughter Act. The Act, which came into force in April, requires the authorities to prove that the way an organisation's "activities are organised or managed by its senior managers causes a person's death".

"The police and the HSE are taking a very wide interpretation of who is a senior manager," said Burnley.

He said some lawyers had expected the police to be inadequately trained to pursue corporate manslaughter enquiries. But in the cases he is handling, officers have day-to-day advice from HSE inspectors, who are priming them with questions to ask managers about risk assessments and safety management generally, but also higher-level support.

"They were, and still are, advised in the way they go about the prosecutions by the Crown Prosecution Service [CPS] and, from time to time, by the attorney general," he said.

Investigators are also spending a lot of time at the organisations' premises. "They stay around," he warned, "and that has a psychological effect on workers and managers and the board. The time they've spent interviewing people has really taken me aback."

The police in the investigations he has been involved in have said they see the offence as "one step down from murder" he noted.

The CPS is not thought to have brought forward any corporate manslaughter charges under the new Act to date, but Burnley said they are looking for a big organisation to make an example of.

A full report on Burnley's presentation to the IIRSM/HSW conference will be published in HSW magazine next month.