Chris Knoop was killed and three of his co-workers were badly burned in a fire at the copany's factory in December 2005. Shortly afterwards, the directors put the company into voluntary iquidation so that it effectively ceased to exist. The company was not being pursued by creditors, and had no debts it could not meet. It was not bankrupt. It is clear that the directors would up the company deliberately, so that they could get out of beig held accountable for killing one of their workers.

The limitation of the Health and Safety At Work Act is that it allows companies to be prosecuted, but not individual directors. The company can be fined, but the bosses are not held personally accountable. Any attempt to prosecute directors individually under the Homicide Act is usually a non-starter. The law on manslaughter was intended to cover the killing of one individual by another, by a direct action, and it has not evolved to take account of corporate killing. Directors, and companies, tend to kill their workers by omission: they omit to follow correct safety procedures, maintain machinery, supervise untrained staff, provide proper equipment.

The Corporate Manslaughter Act, which only became law in April this year, was meant to get round this by making it possible to prosecute a company for manslaughter, without having to tie the cause of a worker's death to an individual director's actions. However, it is not likely to induce companies to value their workers safety any more highly, because the only penalty it provides is for companies to be fined to the same level as under the old health and safety law. In practice, you would get a stiffer penalty - inevitably a jail sentence - for killing one person accidentally in a drunken fight than a company would for killing a dozen workers through deliberate negligence. And it is still possible for directors to wind up a company in advance of a court case so that, if they are successfully prosecuted, it will have no effect on them. What North West Aerosols did was just that: liquidated the company, paid off the debts, and pocketed the remaining proceeds. It was a thoroughly cynical move to avoid losing any of the capital they had invested in the business.

The Health and Safety Executive seems pleased to have got a conviction against North West Aerosols, but a conviction without punishment is valueless. Of course, it is not surprising that the new law does not provide new penalties. In a capitalist society, lives will always be of less value than profits.

(Further information: Families Against Corporate Killers www.fack.org )