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Crime and Policing Bill 2025: Corporate criminal liability widened, civil recovery cost caps for enforcement agencies, and POCA 2002 confiscation reforms to boost asset recovery

Published on: 27 February 2025

Published by a Law360 reporter

Legal News

Article summary

Long-trailed changes appended to the Crime and Policing Bill 2025, laid before Parliament by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on 25 February 2025, aim to broaden corporate criminal liability and fortify investigations to recoup the assets of fraudsters. The draft law would likewise curb the financial risks borne by enforcers in litigation. Here, Law360 flags three aspects of the government’s new Bill you may have overlooked.

Corporate criminal liability widens

The centrepiece for white-collar specialists is a plan to extend the spectrum of offences for which a corporate body can face criminal liability when they are committed by senior managers. After years of prosecutorial frustration, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA 2023) overhauled the legal test, allowing authorities such as the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to hold companies liable for economic offences carried out by their senior managers. These fresh measures would go further. The Bill would reshape the legal test, known as the identification doctrine, so it embraces all kinds of crime in principle and across a broader array of situations in practice. In a wider set of cases, prosecutors could attribute a company’s actions and ‘state of mind’ to those of its senior managers, clarifying the...

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