Government issues draft of new Corporate Manslaughter Bill

Home Secretary Charles Clarke hailed the draft as a solution to the thorny issue of identifying a “directing mind” in a situation where a worker dies.

“We propose a new test which looks more widely at the failings of senior management of an organisation,” he writes in the foreword to the draft.

The Construction Confederation welcomed the draft, but the Centre for Corporate Accountability worried that it doesn’t go far enough.

The CC said it wasn’t fair to target individuals.

“System failure is often at fault for accidents,” said chief executive Stephen Ratcliffe. “This quite rightly resists the temptation to target individual directors. Moves to hold individual directors accountable would only have cut across the collective responsibility for the management of health and safety that should exist in organisations. “

He added that under existing law, courts can impose unlimited fines on companies and individuals under the Health and Safety at Work Act, but they rarely do.

Ratcliffe also praised the draft legislation for ending the immunity enjoyed by public sector clients: “The decision to lift crown immunity and extend the offence to cover the public sector should encourage client responsibility and help ensure public sector clients take into account a contractor’s health and safety performance when awarding contracts.”

But the Centre for Corporate Accountability stated on its website that the draft legislation still aims too high in a company to do any good.

It states: “The offence requires a focus on the conduct of the senior managers of a company – what the government calls ‘strategic’ decision makers. In 2000, the Home Office had considered a focus on management failures at all levels within the company was appropriate. The new focus on senior managers could well be too narrow, and allow the organisation to escape prosecution simply by turning a blind eye to serious failures in the working practices of lower level managers.

“The definition of who is a senior manager is quite restricted. Managers controlling a large construction site belonging to a particular company which itself controls many other such sites – may well not be considered a ‘senior manager’ within the terms of the bill. As a result their conduct – however serious - could not result in the company being prosecuted In effect the Bill encourages reduced supervision of directors and other senior company officers and increased delegation to managers at a more operational level.”

The draft was launched just as the private members bill, called the Directors Duties Bill, failed its second reading in March because only 28 MPs showed up for the debate.