Phoenix Journal · LEV Testing
When someone dies at work, prosecutors look upwards - at how the whole organisation was run, not only at the person nearest the accident. Understanding that shift is the first step to keeping your people, and your business, on the right side of it.
Workplace safety
Corporate manslaughter is not a charge about one bad day - it is a judgement on how an organisation chose to run itself over months and years.
For anyone responsible for a commercial kitchen, that distinction matters more than it first appears. A fatality on your premises - a fire that spreads through a grease-choked extract system, a build-up of combustion gases in a poorly ventilated space, a member of staff overcome at a cooking line - is investigated by asking a simple, uncomfortable question: was this an accident, or the predictable result of the way the business was managed? The answer decides whether you are looking at an improvement notice, an unlimited fine, or a criminal conviction that follows the company and its directors for years.
The reassuring part is that the same systems which keep people safe are the systems that demonstrate you took your duties seriously. Clean ductwork, tested ventilation and a tidy paper trail are not bureaucracy for its own sake. They are the evidence that, long before anything went wrong, you were doing the right things.
The numbers that focus the mind
The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 came into force on 6 April 2008, creating an offence under Section 1 that a company itself can commit. Before it, prosecutors had to pin a death on a single "controlling mind" - a named senior individual whose personal guilt could be proved. In a modern business with layered management, that was often impossible, and organisations escaped accountability for failures that were genuinely collective. The Act removed that shield. The focus now sits on the way an organisation's activities are managed or organised by its senior management, and the failings of several people can be added together, or aggregated, to establish the offence.
Sentencing changed just as decisively. The Sentencing Council's definitive guideline, effective from 1 February 2016, ties penalties to the size and turnover of the convicted organisation. Starting points run into the hundreds of thousands of pounds, top-bracket fines for large companies reach around £20m, and the maximum is unlimited. A court can also impose a remedial order forcing you to fix the failing, and a publicity order - which in a corporate manslaughter case will ordinarily be imposed - compelling you to publicise the conviction. For a hospitality brand, that last penalty can do more lasting damage than the fine itself.
Corporate manslaughter targets the organisation as a whole, but it does not stand alone. It sits within a wider framework of duties that reach individuals as well. Under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, Section 2 requires you to protect employees so far as is reasonably practicable, and Section 3 extends that protection to others affected by your work - customers, contractors, delivery drivers, the public. A breach that causes death can be prosecuted under Section 33, and where it is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of a director, or attributable to their neglect, Section 37 makes that director personally guilty of the same offence.
That is the route by which a fatality becomes a personal matter for the people at the top. Where an individual's conduct falls truly and grossly below the standard expected, they can also face gross negligence manslaughter, which carries a prison sentence. The Health and Safety Offences Definitive Guideline, in force since February 2016, has already pushed courts towards immediate custodial sentences for directors in serious fatal cases. The old assumption that a company would simply absorb a fine and move on no longer holds.
None of this rewards ignorance. "I did not know" is not a defence - it is closer to an admission. The HSE and the Institute of Directors set the expectation plainly in their joint guidance, INDG417 Leading health and safety at work, which frames health and safety as a board-level responsibility that must be led from the top, reviewed like any other business risk, and resourced properly. A director who cannot show how they monitored ventilation, fire safety and air quality across the business is a director who cannot show they discharged that duty. If you run several sites, that oversight has to travel with you; keeping consistent standards across a multi-site operation is exactly the kind of systemic control the courts look for when they decide whether a failure was one-off or built in.
A commercial kitchen concentrates almost every hazard the law worries about into one hot, busy room. Cooking generates grease-laden vapour that coats the inside of canopies and ductwork, where it becomes fuel for a fire that ventilation can carry straight through the building. Gas appliances produce combustion by-products, including carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), that a failing extract system can leave to accumulate. Temperatures at the line sit well above a comfortable 30°C. This is precisely the environment in which a management shortcut - a skipped clean, a broken fan left unrepaired, an extract system never tested - can end in a death that a court will trace back to the boardroom.
Two duties do most of the work here. The first is keeping ductwork clean, in line with the recognised standard for grease removal, so a small fire cannot become a fatal one. The second is your obligation under Regulation 9 of the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 (COSHH) to keep local exhaust ventilation in efficient working order and to have it thoroughly examined and tested by a competent person. For most systems that thorough examination and test (a TExT) is required at least once every 14 months, with certain higher-risk processes under COSHH Schedule 4 falling due far sooner. The competent person checks the system genuinely captures and controls contaminants against the workplace exposure limits published in HSE's EH40, and you keep the resulting report for at least five years.
Read those requirements again with corporate manslaughter in mind and their real value becomes clear. Each dated, signed report is a piece of evidence that your organisation identified a risk and acted on it before anyone was harmed. A continuous history of cleaning and testing is the difference between a defensible position and a damning one. And because the standard the court applies is about management over time, not a single inspection, the practical task is to build a routine you never let slip - and, if the worst does happen, to respond in a way that shows control rather than panic. The discipline of managing an incident without losing your customers draws on the same instincts: act early, document honestly, and put safety first.
Questions
Yes. If someone dies and a court finds the death was caused by the way your organisation's activities were managed or organised at senior level, the company can be convicted under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007. A neglected extract system - one never cleaned or never tested - is exactly the kind of systemic failing that can support such a charge. The penalty is an unlimited fine, with the guideline placing large organisations in a bracket reaching around 20 million pounds.
Both are possible. The corporate manslaughter offence targets the organisation, but Section 37 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 makes a director personally guilty where a breach was committed with their consent or connivance, or was attributable to their neglect. In the gravest cases an individual can face gross negligence manslaughter, which carries a prison sentence. Claiming you were unaware of a safety failure tends to count against you, not for you.
LEV testing under COSHH Regulation 9 gives you dated, independent evidence that a competent person examined your ventilation and confirmed it controls contaminants effectively. Because corporate manslaughter is judged on management over time rather than a single moment, an unbroken record of thorough examinations - due at least every 14 months for most systems - demonstrates you took your duties seriously. Kept alongside your duct-cleaning records for the required five years, it is one of the strongest defences you can build.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix examines and tests local exhaust ventilation to HSG258 and COSHH - measured, reported and certificated, UK-wide.