Ministers to reconsider 'senior manager test'

Safety campaigners welcomed the announcement, which was part of the Government's response to a recent joint report by the Home Affairs and Work and Pensions committees concerning the draft legislation.

In the draft Bill, no prosecution could take place unless the serious failure within the company was at a senior manager level. The committees' report had strongly criticised this wording, arguing that it created a "perverse incentive" for senior directors to delegate decisions on health and safety to more junior staff in order to avoid the danger of prosecution.

The select committees; report said that juries should instead be asked to decide whether "management failure" was to blame for any death resulting from gross negligence..

Wrongly interpreted

The Government yesterday defended its position, claiming that it would not be fair to hold any corporation as a whole responsible for an offence which resulted from management failures occurring "solely at a relatively junior level".

However, it also accepted that the so-called "senior management test" had been "widely interpreted in a way in which the Government did not intend."

Its response went on to say: "Because it is very important that the offence is clear, properly understood and commands confidence, the Government accepts the committees' recommendation that the test should be reconsidered."

The Centre for Corporate Accountability's UK director Maggie Robbins said she welcomed the Government's "generally positive reply to Parliament".

"In particular, we support the Government's agreement to reconsider the 'senior manager' test and replace it with a test that considers the failures at both a 'supervisory and strategic' level within the organisation," she added.

Individual directors

The Government also reaffirmed that it would not introduce secondary liability for individual directors as part of the legislation. It claimed that other laws already made provision for holding individual directors and others to account where they had been grossly negligent or had contributed to health and safety failures.

"We do not agree that the Bill should be used to revisit this framework," it said. "However, a conviction for corporate manslaughter will raise important questions about the management of a company and the Government is looking further at the interaction between legislation on disqualification of directors and the new offence."

The Health and Safety Commission (HSC) recently confirmed that it was exploring the possibility of imposing duties on directors of private sector and public bodies.

Responding to criticism over the length of time it had taken to produce a Bill on corporate manslaughter, the Government said it was "firmly committed to taking the process of reform through to completion and is keen to do so without further delay."

It committed to producing a revised Bill "at the earliest opportunity" the only caveat being "as soon as parliamentary time allows".