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Summary
of CCA Written Evidence to the Select Committee on Environment
Transport and the Regions
Summary
The HSE's "enforcement" philosophy, policy
and practice is highly inadequate and leads to thousands
of companies and directors escaping prosecution for
crimes involving serious injury and death.. This high
level of corporate impunity has a number of very serious
implications.
- it brings into question
the integrity of the criminal justice system built
upon principles of due process and equality before
the law;
- it fails to respond to the
needs of families and victims - considered legitimate
in relation to other offences - for moral justice
and accountability;
- it fails to establish a
system of deterrence in which companies are deterred
from placing the lives of workers at risk.
HSE's policies are grounded in
the flawed conclusions of the Robens Report which has
allowed the HSE, consistently and explicitly, to place
its work outside a criminal justice context.
Our strongest criticisms are directed at the HSE's failure
(between 1996-8)
- to ensure that more than
60% of major injuries are reported to the HSE
- to investigate more than
11.2% of major injuries to workers;
- to prosecute more than 11.4%
of major injuries and 18.8% of deaths;
- to prosecute a single director
or manager after any workplace death or major injury;
- to prosecute more than 28%
of death cases in the Crown courts;
- to consider the possible
commission of GBH offences after a major injury;
- to have a consistent investigation/prosecution
policy between regions/industries;
- to refer more than 1.2%
of deaths to the police where they consider the
possible commission of corporate manslaughter to
the police;
The HSE needs to separate, organisationally,
its preventative inspection work from its injury/death
investigations. It needs to have a different enforcement
philosophy for each - one which emphasises the importance
of criminal justice concerns to its investigation of
major injuries/deaths. The HSE's criminal justice work
needs to have a large financial imput to stop the current
high level of corporate immunity
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