Introduction

It has been well documented that corporate crime has enormous economic, physical and social costs. Yet despite this, such crimes remain almost entirely absent from ‘crime, law and order’ agendas. One might have been forgiven for thinking, however, that with the noises emanating from the Home Office around the introduction of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act (CDA), and the requirement for local crime and community safety audits in particular, such offences may have received some local community, regulatory and policing attention. If the CDA represented the UK government's legislative endorsement of ‘community safety’ as the driving force behind new strategies of crime control, this agenda was supposedly more ‘open’: ‘[c]rucially the Act does not prescribe in any detail what the agenda for the local partnership should be …’ (Home Office, 1998b, Foreword). Thus, ‘[t]he Crime and Disorder Act deliberately avoids attempting to define the terms ‘crime’ or ‘disorder’ within this context. Nor does it impose any list of particular topics which every strategy must address…. Within reason, nothing is ruled out and nothing is ruled in’ (Home Office, 1998b, para 1.43).

The institutionalisation of community safety by New Labour, then, in rhetorical terms at least, appeared to open up new spaces in local debates on harm and crime. However, the argument of this chapter is that some of the more specific, recent processes associated with community safety, and the wider problematic of which, for us, it is a part – namely, ‘governing through crime’ – have played key roles in rendering corporate crime less rather than more visible. What follows is an attempt to describe and understand those processes.

Corporate threats to community safety

‘Corporate crime’ covers a vast range of offences of omission and commission with differing types of modus operandi, perpetrators, effects and victims. In order to appreciate the range of harms encapsulated by the term ‘corporate crime’, it is worth thinking of such crimes in terms of four broad categories, or types, of offences.

One such category covers various financial crimes, including: illegal share dealings, mergers and takeovers; various forms of tax evasion; bribery; and other forms of illegal accounting.