The bill had been delayed while Parliament debated whether to include responsibility for deaths in custody in the bill. This has now been resolved, allowing those responsible for prisoners to be prosecuted under the law, and the bill has been passed.
The key change that the bill makes is to remove the need for prosecutors to identify a single ‘controlling mind’ at the company being prosecuted. Under common law manslaughter, companies could only be prosecuted if all the conditions for gross negligence were found in a single director. That meant that large corporations, with poor internal communications, could escape prosecution, on the basis that no single director knew of the poor working practices leading to the accident.
The law met with a mixed response from unions. The Trades Unions Congress, the body representing most UK unions, welcomed the law. General Secretary Brendan Barber said, “We are pleased that a sensible decision has been taken and the bill will now become law. Even though unions wanted the bill to make individual directors personally liable for safety breaches and penalties against employers committing safety crimes to be tougher, we hope it will mean the start of a change in the safety culture at the top of the UK’s companies and organisations.”
“The catalogue of avoidable workplace deaths in recent years has highlighted in stark terms the need for a change of attitude over safety in UK boardrooms. To make a real difference, we now need to ensure that this law is accompanied by a new legal health and safety duty on directors and a requirement on companies to report annually on their workplace safety culture.”
However, construction union UCATT was less enthusiastic. Alan Ritchie, general secretary of UCATT, said, “Ultimately any legislation involving corporate manslaughter is to be welcomed. However this is a hollow victory. The legislation falls far short of Labour Party policy, passed following UCATT’s motion at [Labour Party] conference in 2006 which committed the party to campaign for director’s duties and the possibility of imprisonment for negligent directors.”
“The issue of director’s duties will not go away because without them the construction industry will not become an appreciably safer industry. UCATT will continue to campaign for their introduction. It is the single most important piece of legislation to stop our members being killed at work.”
On the employers’ side, Construction Plant-hire Association chief executive Colin Wood, welcomed the legislation, but said that more needed to be done to tackle the problem of individuals ignoring corporate health and safety policies. Wood said, “We welcome anything that improves the industry’s culture of health and safety, but, aside from added pressure on management, it falls incumbent on the Health and Safety Commission to make personal responsibility more of an issue. There needs to be more personal accountability, and this only addresses the company side.”
