Corporate Killing Laws Won't Make Us Safer

Grimly, but fittingly, legislation inspired by a series of rail disasters has been endlessly delayed. A new statute on corporate manslaughter - first suggested after the Southall crash and then accelerated by Hatfield three years later - has been shunted into various Westminster sidings but seemed to have been re-timetabled yesterday after the collapse of attempted prosecutions over the Hatfield crash.

The rewritten law would make it easier to stand at a boardroom door and shout: "Officer, it was them!" But, while most moral arguments favour a law of corporate killing, the difficulty is giving the pointing finger strength.

The MRSA outbreak is a useful test case. Patient infections are clearly not the result of an act of God but of negligence at some level: standards of hygiene have slipped since Hattie Jacques ran NHS wards, and staff do not wash their hands as frequently. If a patient dies from MRSA, grieving relatives might have a case for institutional negligence or, in the newly mooted legal terms, corporate killing.

Yet who is to blame? The dirty-fingered nurse or doctor who transferred bugs from one wound to another? The matron who failed to tell them to scrub up, or the administrator who failed to tell the matron? And, given that it was never the intention of staff to spread infection, is it right to criminalise tiredness and disorganisation, or even laziness?

Then, if the penalty were financial, we would have a situation in which the state was reducing the money available to a state-funded body. Some campaigners sidestep this difficulty by suggesting that the law should apply only to private companies. There may be some logic in this - it feels worse to be killed by negligence driven by profit than by mistakes made by low-paid public-sector workers - but it seems wrong to indemnify the state and, in an age of public-private crossover, hard to enforce.

And, even if such a law were forced through, the corporations would soon re-turf the playing field in their favour. While we hope that their response to negligence legislation would be to improve safety, cynicism and history suggest the first move would be to ratchet up their insurance and protection against damages.

Then, in the traditional corporate reaction to the threat of change, they would threaten or enforce higher prices and lower wages or pay rolls, citing increased insurance costs. Soon, huge disclaimer signs would rise outside HQs and branches, and employees and customers would find themselves required to tick little boxes accepting responsibility for their own welfare.

As the grieving Hatfield families and others have discovered, trying to pin the blame on a business makes the odds on needles in haystacks look attractive. Corporations are expert at deflection, and it's hard to see how a law could be worded that had an effect other than forcing the bereaved to pay lawyers higher fees for longer while actions congealed in the British and European courts of appeal.

It's hinted that the sanctions under a new act would aim less for imprisonment of individuals than for fines and the stigmatisation of a company. But in the areas of medicine and rail, where inattention is most likely to cause death, much of the public is at the mercy of virtual monopoly providers. A stigmatised institution is one you may still have to use.

There's also the question of whether the attempt to create an offence of corporate killing is part of an institutional refusal in the present generation to accept risk and death. The phrase "stuff happens" - Donald Rumsfeld's version for a rightwing Christian administration of the Vietnam motto "shit happens" - is gaining a new currency because David Hare has used it as the title of his play about the Iraq war.

As it happens, Hare's last play, The Permanent Way, was about the journey from railway privatisation to train disasters, including Hatfield. It was a brilliant account of how ideology, compromise and inattention in an industry can lead to the funerals of its customers.

And yet it is hard to believe that any of the politicians, directors or passengers in the play would have behaved differently simply because a law of corporate killing lay on the statute books. Hare might reasonably have called his railway play Stuff Happens.

Corners are cut and backs are turned in business because it has proved to be the only way of maintaining the levels of price that consumers have decided they deserve. A social revolution would be necessary to change these attitudes, and, until it happens, it seems a poor solution to use the law against corporations who are notorious, among many things, for their employment of smart, expensive lawyers.