Government widens corporate killing test

News | HSW
01.04.2006

Ministers are to redraft the corporate manslaughter bill to allow juries to look beyond senior management in deciding whether there is corporate responsibility for a fatality. Home Office minister Fiona MacTaggart said the government accepted a panel of MPs' argument that the test for responsibility after a fatality should be widened to cover "management failure".

The change has been welcomed by critics of the draft bill, who had claimed that restricting the responsibility test to senior management would lead to legal wrangling over the definition of seniority and would mean there was little chance of securing a conviction in decentralised companies with semi-autonomous local management. The test will now be redrawn to consider failure to guard against fatal accidents at a "supervisory and strategic" level.

But MacTaggart rejected some of the other recommendations of the cross-party, pre-legislative scrutiny panel which reported last December. These included holding individual directors responsible for contributing to corporate manslaughter, with possible prison terms of up to 14 years. She argued that individuals can already be prosecuted for gross negligence manslaughter under criminal law, demonstrated by the convictions last month of two rail contractors, though there have been no successful prosecutions of directors of large organisations.

The Home Office also refused to remove the proposed exemptions covering deaths in prison, in police custody and in the armed forces, but said it would consider whether unincorporated bodies such as partnerships should be covered. It also confirmed that for sub-contracted operations, manslaughter charges would not have to be limited to the immediate employer only.

The government first proposed broadening the law on corporate manslaughter in 1997 and finally published the bill in March 2005. There is no timetable for its publication and passage through parliament, though the government says it will be passed "when parliamentary time allows".