Tom McNeill is quoted in Law360 and GIR on the expanded ‘senior manager test’ introduced by the Crime and Policing Act 2026:
Tom McNeill, Partner at BCL, said that "senior manager" was so broadly defined that it could include department heads. The text also opens up the possibility of organisations being prosecuted for driving or sexual offences — though these are likely to fail, McNeil added.
He said the reform could increase costs and burdens for businesses, while doing little to tackle crime.
"Going even further than the failure-to-prevent model, the senior manager test removes any pretence that the organisation is being found liable for its own culpable failings, namely for failing to prevent someone else's wrongdoing," McNeil said. "This is simple vicarious liability for wrongdoing by a senior manager."
GIR:
Tom McNeill, Partner at BCL, questioned whether the legislation marks a shift in prosecutorial priorities or if it is just a tool to help get difficult cases over the line.
“They want it to be easier to prosecute companies, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a principled justification for it,” McNeill said. “Prosecutors may think: ‘We were sure this was a bad company, we just couldn’t get the evidence to prove it in order to prosecute them’. Evidence, however, is pretty important.”
If a business is to be prosecuted for a serious criminal offence that could potentially cost “enormous sums of money and very significant reputational harm”, prosecutors should be able to prove that the company itself was complicit in a meaningful way, the lawyer added.
“The real world is that these are companies whose primary focus is obviously going to be upon conducting their ordinary business,” McNeill said. “There’s a limit to what a commercial organisation can do to prevent individuals from committing wrongdoing.”
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