It has been designed to encourage greater accountability for health & safety at board and senior management level, and though some claim it isn't as powerful as it could have been, it does grant far more power to health & safety watchdogs than any previous piece of legislation. However, research carried out by the British Safety Council (BSC) found that thousands of British companies remain ignorant of the Corporate Manslaughter Act, leaving them extremely vulnerable to very serious criminal charges and putting employees' lives at risk. This is very worrying in view of the implications carried by the new Act.

Under the new Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, companies will face unlimited fines as well as various other penalties if found guilty of corporate manslaughter. While it is currently possible to prosecute companies for manslaughter, this will become far easier under the new Act. For a successful manslaughter conviction under current law, the prosecution is forced to prove that a director or senior manager - a 'controlling mind' - is guilty. In practice, particularly in prosecutions of large companies, it can be very difficult to make a convictable link between a death and any specific 'controlling mind'.

The new offence means that companies will be considered guilty of corporate manslaughter if there are shown to be 'gross failures' in the management of health & safety, resulting in death. A substantial part of this failure must be at 'senior level' - the people who make significant decisions for the organisation. This includes centralised headquarters functionaries as well as those in operational management. Courts will look at management systems and practices across an organisation, and if these structures have caused a death resulting from 'a gross breach of duty of care' to the deceased, then the organisation will be considered guilty.

The organisation's conduct will have to have fallen below what could be reasonably expected; juries will have to take into account any health & safety breaches, and how serious and dangerous they were.

This law hasn't been enacted to catch people out - it's just there to make sure corners aren't cut and lives are saved. Considering the potentially very steep penalties courts will soon be able to apply to those found guilty of a corporate killing, it suddenly makes a lot of sense to tighten up working practices in shopping and retail centres before April.

While you may incur a few extra costs, however bad they seem, they are nothing compared to the possible 10 per cent of average annual turnover fine with which you could be faced after one accident. Furthermore, a court can choose to impose a publicity order, which means the guilty party would have to advertise their offence in a manner ordered by the court. This could be a double page spread in the nationals or a billboard shouting the offence to all who pass by. Either way it is not something to be desired.

When dealing with the public, safe working practices is a topic which should be at the top of the agenda and systems should already be in place to ensure that there is minimal risk to those using the centre. Preparations for compliance to the new Act should include revisiting all your health & safety policies to make sure that they comply with the latest legislation. Proper risk assessments should always be carried for all relevant common areas and arrangements with centre tenants and contractors should ensure clear areas of responsibility and consistency with your own health & safety policies.

This is not about producing more red tape, but about making sure that people are working in the safest environment possible. In the litigious culture that we seem to have fostered in the UK in recent years, burying your head in the sand is no longer an option.

The BSC runs a one day Health & Safety for Directors course which covers the whole area of corporate manslaughter and directors' responsibilities in terms of health & safety. This course can be tailored to an organisation's needs when run as an in-company version.

l Richard Trust is the national

accounts manager for the BSC

Simple solution to slips and trips

As part of its new campaign to reduce injuries, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has published a case study of a large and busy city centre shopping mall, showing how hazards can be identified and rectified.

By analysing known incidents, the manager found that there was a pronounced peak in incidents on the mall walkways over the lunchtime period and that these were mostly slipping events.

The mall being rather busier at lunchtime could not account for this peak. Not surprisingly, shoppers at around this time of day, often workers from nearby offices on their lunch break, were eating their lunch while browsing the mall. Dropped food and spilled drinks were bound to happen and led to slips. To compound matters the mall's cleaners' meal break was at just this time, leaving no one to identify and deal with these slip-risk spillages.

Altering the cleaners' meal break pattern so that spillages were cleaned up quickly during this busy pedestrian period eliminated this mid-day peak and consequently significantly reduced overall slip incident levels.

This analysis focused management's attention on the importance of cleaning in slip and trip prevention. Redesigning the cleaning system for dealing with any floor contamination so that it is responded to quickly, isolated from pedestrians and cleaned to a fully dry finish before returning to pedestrian use has contributed to reducing slip and trip incidents to less than a third of previous levels.

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