The Oxford Mail has won its campaign for a new law of corporate killing.

Home Secretary Jack Straw is to announce proposals for a criminal charge that will mean company directors can be held directly accountable for health and safety and prosecuted for manslaughter.

Mr Straw, who has a home at Minster Lovell, near Witney, will publish a consultation paper outlining the details of the proposed offence later this month.

It will pave the way for a Government Bill by the end of the summer to be included in the next Queen's speech in November. The move is a major triumph for the Oxford Mail, which launched its campaign after the Paddington rail disaster resulted in the deaths of 31 people last October.

The Home Secretary's announcement will be supplemented by one from Environment Minister Michael Meacher tightening health and safety legislation.

This follows a report by the transport committee of the Commons demanding action, and has been welcomed by MPs.

Under Mr Straw's proposed legal changes, company directors and executors will be directly accountable in law for health and safety so that prosecuting authorities can identify them and take them to court for manslaughter. Under the existing law, it has been virtually impossible to find directors guilty of the "grossly negligent error" required to prove such an allegation because no single individual can be identified as the controlling mind.

In the past, big companies have wriggled out of prosecutions by showing that a number of senior executives all had different roles in an accident.

So far just two company directors have gone to prison for manslaughter and ministers are frustrated that there have been no prosecutions of directors for the deaths resulting from the Marchioness and Herald of Free Enterprise disasters and the Southall and Paddington rail crashes.

The Crown Prosecution Service was expected to confirm today that nobody will be prosecuted over Paddington. As a backup to Mr Straw's plans there will also be a new offence of "corporate killing" that will make companies liable to unlimited fines if a "failure of management systems" is proved. The courts will get new powers to disqualify directors and freeze company assets.

An inquiry into the Paddington crash will be launched tomorrow by Lord Cullen. In 1988 he handled the inquiry into the 167 deaths in the 1988 Piper Alpha North Sea oil rig disaster.

There are bound to be further calls for action against senior directors, which will be addressed in the consultation documents from the Home Office and the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions. The proposals will not be retrospective, but will go further than those contained in a draft Bill published by the Law Commission in 1996, highlighted by the Oxford Mail campaign.

This failed to address the issue of jail sentences for individual directors.

Ministers believe that fines are no deterrent to individual directors, who write them off under tax law. The proposals also include new remedial measures so that companies that are told to correct health and safety systems but fail to do so will be committing a criminal offence.

The source said: "This would, for example, force rail companies to put signals right when these had caused a train crash and, by disqualifying individual directors, we will stop senior executives waltzing off to manage other companies."