10 February 2010
The Sentencing Guidelines Council has today published its long awaited guidelines, to which the courts must have regard from 15 February 2010 when sentencing in cases involving corporate manslaughter or health & safety offences which cause death. The key points which come from the guidelines are:
• It applies only to the sentencing of organisations, not individuals.
• Fines for offences under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 should seldom be less than £500,000, and may be measured in millions of pounds.
• Fines for offences under the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 (and any health and safety regulations) which were the significant cause of a death should seldom be less than £100,000, and may be measured in several hundreds of thousand pounds or more.
The guidelines set out a synthesis of the aggravating, mitigating and other relevant factors which the court must take into account when setting the level of the fine. These are already familiar principles, stemming from a decision of the Court of Appeal in 1998 and having been further approved and expanded upon, perhaps most usefully, in a case which followed the Hatfield rail disaster. It is noteworthy, however, that the guidelines go further than before in requiring the accused to have co-operated to a high level with the investigation of the offence if it is to rely on that as a mitigating factor.
In terms of setting the level of fine:
• The guidelines prescribe the types of financial information about the defendant which should be provided to the sentencing court. The obligation to do so lies primarily on the defendant itself.
• A direct correlation between the fine and either turnover or profit will be inappropriate. Instead, the court will need to consider the circumstances of the defendant organisation on a case by case basis, and the fine should be one which the defendant is capable of paying, even if that is over a period of a number of years.
Finally, the defendant will normally be required to pay the prosecution’s costs.
The impact of the guidelines is that they crystallise the general upward trend in fines for corporate manslaughter and health & safety offences.
1 R v F Howe & Son (Engineers) Limited [1999] 2 Cr App R (S) 37
R v Balfour Beatty Rail Infrastructure Services Limited [2006] EWCA Crim 1586
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