The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 came into force on 6 April 2008. For the first time, companies and organisations can be found guilty of corporate manslaughter as a result of serious management failures resulting in a fatality caused by a gross breach of a duty of care.
The offence is concerned with corporate liability and does not apply to directors or other individuals who have a senior role in the company or organisation. However, existing health and safety offences and gross negligence manslaughter will continue to apply to individuals. Prosecutions against individuals will continue to be taken where there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest to do so.
Under the new Act, juries will be required to consider breaches of health and safety legislation in determining liability of companies and other corporate bodies for corporate manslaughter/homicide. Juries may also consider whether a company or organisation has taken account of any appropriate health and safety guidance and the extent to which there were attitudes, policies, systems or accepted practices within the organisation that were likely to have encouraged any such serious management failure or have produced tolerance of it.
Penalties will include unlimited fines, remedial orders and publicity orders. A remedial order will require a company or organisation to take steps to remedy any management failure that led to a death. The court can also impose an order requiring the company or organisation to publicise that it has been convicted of the offence, giving the details, the amount of any fine imposed and the terms of any remedial order made. The publicity order provisions will not come into force until the Sentencing Guidelines Council has developed relevant guidance.
This Act is further reason for companies and organisations to keep their health and safety management systems under review, in particular, the way in which their activities are managed or organised by their senior management.