From top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness.There was significant institutional resistance to the appropriateness of using the criminal law in general, and homicide charges in particular in this type of situation.
[citation needed] Judicial review of the coroner's inquest persuaded the Director of Public Prosecutions to bring manslaughter charges against P&O European Ferries and seven employees, but the trial judge ruled that there was no evidence that one sufficiently senior member of the company's management could be said to have been negligent.
[1] However, a prosecution of Great Western Trains following the Southall rail crash collapsed because "the Crown was not in a position to satisfy the doctrine of identification" (Turner J).
Because the only other defendant was GWT, a corporation, this meant that it was impossible to identify a controlling mind for the purposes of holding an individual personally liable for manslaughter.
The Law Commission's 1996 report on involuntary manslaughter found that the gross negligence formula overcomes the problems of having to find one particular officer who has the mens rea for the offence and allows emphasis to be placed on the company's attitude to safety.
Thus, a real tension is exposed between the paradigm of criminal culpability based on individual responsibility and the increasing recognition of the potential for harm inherent in large scale corporate activity.