The Ladbroke Grove Rail Inquiry opened last week amid an outcry at the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) not to bring manslaughter charges against any individuals or companies.

Leaks from a consultation paper by the Home Office and the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, to be published next month, indicate that the government is preparing to bow to public pressure and reform the law on manslaughter.

It will make criminal charges against companies easier, and plans a new offence of corporate killing.

This would mean that individual executives could in future be held personally accountable for the efficiency of their companies' health and safety systems.The move follows the Ladbroke Grove disaster last October, in which a Thames Trains three-carriage turbo, which had left Paddington Station minutes earlier, passed through a signal at red and into the path of a 70-mph express coming into London, killing 31 and injuring hundreds.The spectre of directors serving life sentences for crimes committed while they may have been on holiday has sent shivers through the City, prompting condemnation from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Institute of Directors.

However, more disconcerting for solicitors working at the coalface of corporate disasters are recent indications that the existing law may in fact be amply capable of bringing directors to book.In March, Louise Christian - whose London-based firm Christian Fisher is leading the group of 54 representing the victims of the Ladbroke Grove crash - brought the first successful judicial review of a decision by the CPS not to prosecute for manslaughter over a workplace death.

The case of R v the DPP and others, ex parte Timothy Jones (24 March 2000, unreported) involved an untrained casual worker who was killed while unloading a ship in Shoreham docks.

Lord Justice Buxton, sitting with Mr Justice Moses, ruled that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), David Calvert-Smith, and the CPS had behaved 'irrationally' and failed 'properly to address the relevant law' when they decided there was no realistic prospect of conviction.

The CPS had twice refused to bring a manslaughter prosecution against the general manager of the company concerned, despite a police recom mendation to do so, arguing that there was insufficient evidence.

The High Court ordered the CPS to review the decision 'with dispatch'.On the day after the ruling, David Bergman, executive director of the Centre for Corporate Accountability (CCA), wrote to the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, asking him to 'consider whether the CPS properly handled the work-related death and disaster cases that it has dealt with since 1995 - the year in which the critical case of Adomako (which sets out the law of manslaughter) was decided and which the High Court found to have been misapplied by the CPS'.Ms Christian comments: 'We established that the DPP had been using the wrong test.

This means that the existing law might be sufficient.

The lack of manslaughter prosecutions so far may not be due to problems with the existing law, but to a reluctance to prosecute companies.'The perceived problems with the existing law were fuelled by high-profile failures of manslaughter prosecutions following the 1987 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, in which 187 died, and the 1997 Southall rail crash, which killed seven.

Manslaughter charges against both P&O European Ferries and the Great Western Train Company were dropped because no individual 'controlling mind' within the company could be found guilty of manslaughter.It was in response to Zeebrugge - and to the 1987 Kings Cross London Underground fire, which killed 31, the 1988 Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, which killed 167, and the 1988 Clapham rail crash, which killed 35 - that the 1996 Law Commission report, Legislating the Criminal Code: involuntary manslaughter, proposed the abolition of the requirement to identify a guilty controlling mind of a company before corporate guilt could be proved.

At the time, there was widespread concern that large companies, however grossly negligent they might be, could escape prosecution by deliberately devolving health and safety responsibility via complex networks of accountability.In a sweeping review of the law, Mrs Justice Arden's team proposed a new offence of corporate killing, under which:'(1) A corporation is guilty of corporate killing if:(a) a management failure by the corporation is the cause or one of the causes of a person's death, and(b) that failure constitutes conduct falling far below what can be reasonably expected of the corporation in the circumstances.(2) For the purposes of subsection (1) above:(a) there is a management failure by a corporation if the way in which its activities are managed or organised fails to ensure the health and safety of persons employed in or affected by those activities and(b) such a failure may be regarded as a cause of a person's death notwithstanding that the immediate cause is the act or omission of an individual.'Next month's government consultation paper is expected to follow this recommendation, and also to adopt its proposal that the courts should be empowered to make remedial orders against convicted companies, with non-compliance carrying criminal sanctions.The Law Commission's proposals have been supported by the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL), which has lobbied since their publication for changes to the law on corporate killing.

Last month, APIL member and Labour MP Andrew Dismore successfully brought a ten-minute Bill entitled 'Corporate Homicide' (see [2000] Gazette, 28 April, 5).

In addition to calling for a new offence of corporate killing, the Bill anticipated the government consultation paper in threatening company directors with prison.

The Bill says:'An officer of a cor poration is guilty of corporate killing if (a) a management failure by the corporation is the cause or one of the causes of a person's death...

[and] (b) such a failure may be regarded as a cause of a person's death notwithstanding that the immediate cause is the act or omission of an individual.'Presenting the Bill to the House of Commons, Mr Dismore argued: 'The law is biased against small "one-man band" companies, in which it is easier to identify the individual manager or director who is to blame.

I believe that only imposing duties on the most senior officers of a company will ensure that safety is given the same priority as profit.'Some, including the CBI, argue that prosecutions against directors for failings of which they may not have been aware present the risk of injustice and breaches of the Human Rights Act 1998.

It is also claimed that the proposed penalties would not be substantially different in practice from the sanctions following regulatory offences under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the Merchant Shipping Act 1989 and the Consumer Protection Act 1987.

Breaches of health and safety regulations allow unlimited fines to be levied on companies and the imprisonment of company directors if corporate infringements have been influenced by their neglect or consent.

The Great Western Train Company was fined £1.5 million for breaches of health and safety regulations after Southall, notwithstanding the fact that manslaughter charges were dropped.However, APIL's new president, Frances McCarthy of Pattinson & Brewer, says: 'The health and safety regulations are not completely adequate, as the European directives on which they were based have not been fully implemented.

Also, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which enforces them, are under-resourced and under-manned.

The result is that very little is done when the regulations are breached, and the numbers of prosecutions arising out of fatal cases is very small.' APIL supports the principles of the government consultation paper which have emerged so far, and is also calling for ministers to clarify when a public inquiry should take precedence over a criminal prosecution - a debate which the recent decision not to prosecute following Ladbroke Grove will fuel - and to set up a disaster bureau to co-ordinate these procedures.The CCA is concerned that the Home Office consultation paper will contain a recommendation that the HSE be given the authority to prosecute the proposed offence of corporate killing.

In April, Mr Bergman wrote to the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, saying: 'Manslaughter is one of the most serious crimes in British law.

Prosecution for such an offence should clearly rest with the Crown Prosecution Service, not with a regulatory agency.'The government plans to prepare a new corporate killing Bill ready by the end of the summer, and to have it on the statute books quickly.CORPORATE KILLING FACTS-- In the past ten years there have been more than 3,000 workplace deaths, but only six company directors have been convicted of manslaughter following a work-related death and only two of those have served a prison sentence.-- Only two companies are known to have been convicted of manslaughter, both of these were small businesses in which a guilty controlling mind could easily be identified.-- Between 1992 and 1999, the HSE referred to the CPS only 24 cases which it believed related to potential evidence against a senior company officer.-- Only 19% of workplace deaths result in a prosecution under health and safety law.-- In relat ion to more than 500 deaths between 1996 and 1998, no directors or managers were prosecuted as individuals for health and safety offences.Figures supplied by the Centre for Corporate Accountability