Since 2008, a jury deciding a corporate manslaughter case has been directed to consider tolerance, attitudes and accepted practice. Almost no board report in the UK is built to consider the answer.
Consider a word that appears in UK criminal law and almost never appears in a board safety report.
Tolerance.
Section 8 of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 sets out what a jury weighs when deciding whether there has been a “gross” breach of duty. The jury must consider whether the organisation failed to comply with health and safety legislation, how serious that failure was, and how much of a risk of death it posed. The jury may also consider the extent to which the evidence shows that there were “attitudes, policies, systems or accepted practices within the organisation that were likely to have encouraged any such failure … or to have produced tolerance of it”. [1] Read that list again, because it is a description of culture written into statute.
The Act is equally specific about where it looks. An organisation is guilty only if the way in which its activities are managed or organised by its senior management is a substantial element in the breach. Senior management means those who play significant roles in the making of decisions about how the whole or a substantial part of the organisation’s activities are to be managed or organised, or in the actual managing or organising of them. [2] The Crown Prosecution Service states the consequence directly: an organisation is not liable if the failings were exclusively at a junior level. [3]
The evidentiary range is also wider than many assume. The jury is not prevented from having regard to any other matters they consider relevant, [1] and the CPS notes that evidence of failings unrelated to the fatal incident may be relevant insofar as they show a poor attitude to health and safety within the organisation. [3]
What that means for reporting
Put those provisions together and something becomes clear. Since the offence came into force on 6 April 2008, [3] British law has held that the serious question following a workplace death is organisational, cultural, and situated at senior management level. Culture is not a soft subject in this jurisdiction. It is an element of criminal offence.
Now picture the safety report that went to your board at its last meeting. It very likely contained injury rates against targets, training completion percentages, audit closure rates, observation counts, and a short narrative on the initiatives underway. It was accurate, and it took real work to produce. Set it beside the statute’s vocabulary. Attitudes. Accepted practices. Tolerance. The way senior management managed or organised activities. There is almost no overlap. The document a board receives is not built to answer the question a jury would be directed to ask.
Why the gap exists
This is rarely a failure of the people who build the reports, and more often what happens when a capable function is asked for a status update and delivers one, year after year, until the format hardens into a convention nobody revisits. An update answers how we are doing. The statute asks what we tolerated. Those are different products, and nobody ever commissioned a report on the second.
The consequence is quiet and serious. A report built from outcomes and activity volumes cannot signal a loss of capability until the loss has produced a result. By capacity I mean an organisation’s demonstrated ability to prevent serious harm, and to detect, contain and recover when work departs from the plan. Metrics reveal outcomes; capacity helps determine them.
It also produces a particular blindness. A high audit closure rate is entirely compatible with a low rate of actual change. A falling number of reported concerns is compatible with conditions improving, and equally compatible with people deciding to stop raising them. Both look like progress in a trend line. Neither tells a board whether accepted practice has quietly begun to tolerate a failure.
Four questions, taken from the statute’s own vocabulary
None of the following requires budget or permission. Each moves reporting closer to the question that eventually gets asked.
- Accepted practices. Can you show the board one documented instance where written procedure and actual practice diverged, what the gap was, and what happened next? If the board has only ever seen procedures, it has seen the system as designed rather than the system as run.
- Tolerance. Has the board been shown a concern that was raised and not acted upon, together with the reason why it was not? Counts of reports demonstrate that the channels exist. They reveal nothing about what became of the concerns that went nowhere.
- Senior management. Across the last four meetings, did the board make a safety decision that carried a cost, a trade-off or a schedule consequence? Where safety appears only as a report received and noted, the record shows a reporting relationship rather than a governance one.
- Attitudes. Beyond a survey score, what evidence does the board hold about attitudes at its weakest site, identified by name? Averages conceal range, and range is where exposure lives.
The uncomfortable part
Adding these to your reporting will make it less reassuring. It will surface variance, unresolved concerns and closure evidence that flatters nobody, including the person who prepared it.
It will also be the first occasion on which your board is equipped to govern the exposure rather than receive a summary of its outcomes. And it produces something else worth having, which is a documented record of senior management actively engaging with attitudes, practice and tolerance, created long before anyone has cause to examine it.
Professionals who make that shift stop being the people who report on safety and become the people executives consult before decisions are made. That is not granted on request. It is earned by changing what you put in front of them.
If your board were asked today what your organisation currently tolerates, what in your reporting would allow it to answer?
This article discusses statutory provisions for the purpose of professional discussion and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should take their own advice on how the Act applies to their circumstances.
Key Points for the Article
- Section 8 of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 directs juries to consider attitudes, accepted practices and tolerance, which makes culture an element of a criminal offence rather than a soft subject.
- The Act looks specifically at how senior management managed or organised activities, and the CPS confirms that failings exclusively at junior level does not create liability.
- Standard board safety reporting shares almost no vocabulary with the statutory test.
- Four changes, drawn from the statute’s own terms, move reporting toward the question that gets asked after a fatality.
- The record created by asking those questions is itself evidence of senior management engagement.
About the Author: Shawn M. Galloway
Shawn M. Galloway is CEO of ProAct Safety, advising global enterprises on building the system capacity to prevent harm, recover from disruption, and make safety a driver of business value. He has authored several bestselling books, published more than 500 articles, and created the first safety podcast, Safety Culture Excellence®, now with over 900 episodes. He serves on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, the Forbes Business Council, and the Fast Company Executive Board.
He hosts a complimentary virtual discussion, Three Explanations for a Good Safety Year, on 12 November 2026 at 4.00pm UK time. Details for registration, the recording, and the accompanying board self-assessment are available at proactsafety.com/events.
References
- Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, section 8 (Factors for jury). legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2007/19/section/8. Statutory text reproduced under the Open Government Licence.
- Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, sections 1(3) and 1(4)(c). legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2007/19/section/1
- Crown Prosecution Service, prosecution guidance, “Corporate Manslaughter.” cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/corporate-manslaughter
