Fury over delay to corporate killing laws

Plans to introduce new corporate manslaughter laws suffered a new setback today.

Hopes that tough reforms would be pushed through this year were dashed after the Government said there was only time for draft legislation.

The decision means the final Bill is unlikely to pass through the House of Commons until well after the next general election.

The latest delay will infuriate campaigners, who have been pressing for changes to the law since the Nineties. They say new legislation to make it easier to prosecute companies responsible for fatal accidents should be a top priority.

Pressure to act increased this week after Railtrack bosses escaped charges over the Hatfield rail disaster in 2000.

The case collapsed after an Old Bailey judge ruled there was no evidence to suggest the company put profit before safety. Senior Labour politicians have been promising a

change in the law for more than a decade.

Labour's 2001 election manifesto featured a firm pledge to act. A draft Bill was promised by David Blunkett in May last year but it has repeatedly been put back.

Today the Government insisted it would press ahead with plans to change the law.

A spokesman for the Home Office said: "We are committed-to introducing draft legislation before the end of the parliamentary session."

But officials admit the proposals are being dogged by technical difficulties. They are anxious to avoid the new law being held up in endless judicial reviews by resolving any possible difficulties before putting it forward.

The legal stumbling block is the need to identify one "controlling-mind" of a company - an individual who can be shown to have known all the relevant facts and have been grossly negligent in failing to act. A succession of cases has shown that the bigger the company concerned, the harder it is to demonstrate that a single director is personally responsible for safety failures.

A spokesman for the Home Office admitted: "There are complex questions still that need to be resolved. We had expected to settle our position and produce proposals by now, but some matters have taken longer than expected."

It is understood that this November's Queen's Speech will include a raft of law and order Bills. These are likely to dominate MPs' time before the expected general election in May, leaving little room for a corporate manslaughter Bill.

The latest delay has sparked angry condemnation from survivors of disasters such as the Zeebrugge ferry tragedy, the Clapham Junction crash, and the rail crash at Paddington.

They have accused the Government of running scared of big business, which is strongly opposed to the changes.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: "The Government made a manifesto commitment to introduce a criminal offence of corporate manslaughter and the fact that the number of deaths at work actually rose last year shows that some form of sanction must be available."