Police are arresting managers at their workplaces as part of corporate manslaughter investigations, according to a defence lawyer involved in two of the first deaths being investigated under the new Act.
To date, police have arrested supervisors, site-level managers and directors and interviewed them under caution within weeks of the incident. Police officers present have commented on being surprised by the rigour of the investigations compared with those into fatalities in the past.
Investigators are counting site staff as senior management for the purposes of the Corporate Manslaughter Act. The Act, which came into force in April, requires the authorities to prove that the way an organisation’s activities are organised or managed by its senior managers is what caused a person’s death.
The police and the HSE are taking a very wide interpretation of who is a senior manager. Some lawyers had expected the police to be inadequately trained to pursue corporate manslaughter enquiries, but in many cases handled so far, officers have day-to-day advice from HSE inspectors, who are priming them with questions to ask managers about risk assessments and safety management generally, but also higher-level support.
Investigators are also spending a lot of time at the organisations’ premises. They stay around, and that has a psychological effect on workers and managers and the board. The time they’ve spent interviewing people has been much longer than it ever has been before.
