Under British law, there are circumstances where a criminal offence may have occurred but it is in nobody's interest for a criminal prosecution to be brought. Take speeding offences as an example. Exceeding road speed limits may be against the law, but it is generally held that, unless the excess speec is outrageous, a civil sanction in the form of a fine is preferable to taking up court time giving an offender a criminal record. However, until relatively recendy there was no middle ground for environmental offences between a warning and full-on criminal prosecution. That changed with a 2008 act of parliament, which introduced enforcement undertakings (EUs). The EU is a distinct class of civil sanction in that it gives a company the opportunity to propose the steps it intends to take to right a wrong it has committed.
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