Commentary: Corporate criminal law in the UK has massively changed this week

"The Crime and Policing Act 2026 received Royal Assent this week, so the Identification Doctrine has now been expanded to *all crimes*, not just economic crimes like fraud as things stood under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023.

"So now, any time a senior manager commits *any* crime on the job (i.e. within the scope of their authority), their company can be convicted of that crime as well -- even personal crimes like drink driving or public order offenses. There is no "intent to benefit the company" requirement either (as in the respondeat superior approach used in the US). So this means that even when the company is the main victim of the manager's crime, the company can be convicted of that crime as well.

"Love it or hate it, corporate criminal law in the UK has been massively changed. And what's surprising is how quickly it's gone: Within the space of 4 years, corporate criminal law in the UK went from being an outlier in the narrowness of its corporate criminal liability regime (under the old common law Identification Doctrine) to being an outlier in the opposite direction. That much sweeping legal change that quickly always makes you wonder about unintended consequences. For example, will the new law push companies to adopt costly new compliance measures far beyond the existing already considerable cost of compliance? Will organisations respond by becoming more invasive in how they monitor the activities of senior managers' actions on and perhaps even off the clock? The changes to companies' behaviour are likely to be substantial as they grapple with the realities of this new law."