Careful who you call

According to the Guardian, the HSE and local authorities will be able to request internet service providers and phone companies to hand over records of email and phone exchanges as part of their investigations into safety breaches. The HSE and other public bodies will be able to ask for data that the telecoms companies will now have to store for a month under a new EU Directive.

They won't be able to access the content of the phone and email traffic, just the logs of who wrote to or called whom, to help them in their investigations.

It's the sort of thing that might be useful to investigators looking at a corporate manslaughter charge and would mean that any compromising email that passed through an ISP couldn't simply be wiped from the system and forgotten. There are enough warnings from lawyers about howmuch you should say in accident reports that might end up disclosed to an investigating authority, and here's another reason for caution.

The Guardian piece is here

Corporate manslaughter confusion

The corporate killing law, due in six weeks odd, seems to be exciting lots of business activity, but not always for the right reasons it seems. I was talking to a safety product supplier yesterday who said his order books were full and that businesses were upping the level of employee protection "because all these directors are afraid they could end up in prison".

If that's so they needn't worry, the whole point of the law is that it takes away the need to find a guilty person who said "we'll save a bit of money if we stop buying fall-arrest harnesses" in front of witnesses.

If the authorities investigating a fatality find the health and safety structure, systems and training were inadequate the new law allows them to go after a whole organisation. Nobody will go to prison (not for corporate manslughter, anyway).

But what directors should be fretting about, and are in big busineses, is the level of fines that could be imposed if a corporate killing charge sticks. The sentencing guidelines for judges are still to be finalised, but the recommendation from the Sentencing Advisory Panel is for fines up to 10% of turnover, which is enough to make your average executive board's eyes water.