SUMMARY OF CCA'S RESPONSE TO DETR'S CONSULTATION DOCUMENT "REVITALISING HEALTH AND SAFETY"

• New legal Duties should be imposed upon directors
  
  
• Companies should be legally obliged to provide safety information in their annual reports
  
  
• If the DETR is serious about "encourag[ing] unscrupulous employees to take their health and safety responsibilities seriously" [Para 54] it must provide the HSE sufficient resources so that it can carry out the:
  • investigation of all major injuries;
  • in relation to major injuries and deaths, the prosecution of those companies and their senior officers where sufficient evidence exists.
    
    
• The HSE must at the same time, re-orientate its whole enforcement and prosecution policy setting aside much of the "philosophy" set out in the1972 Robens report which currently grounds its work. The Robens report argued that the criminal law should have a "limited role". However, its conclusions were both empirically and analytically flawed. Crucially, the Robens report failed to distinguish those incidents;
  
  
• which result in major injury and death and where a serious criminal offence may have taken place (although action must also, of coarse, be taken to ensure that it doesn't happen again), from
  
  
• those breaches of the law that do not result in any harm (only an increased risk of harm) where a wholly preventative approach - as laid out in Robens - is required.
  
  
• the HSE must ensure that it has a "consistent" investigation and prosecution policy
  
  
• The HSE must change its prosecution policy in line with the Environment Agency
  
  
• The HSE must consider the application of GBH offences and extend its protocol of liaison
  with the policy in relation to major injuries
  
  
• The HSE must change its practice in relation to the investigation and prosecution of
  directors and managers for health and safety offences
  
  
• HSE inspectors should not prosecute any cases involving death or major injury. The HSE
  should instruct lawyers
  
  
• Lawyers representing the HSE should be instructed by the HSE, in cases involving death and major injury, make strong representations to the magistrate that the case be heard in the Crown Court.
  
  
• the government should enact a number of new result based offences and an offence
  relating to reckless endangerment
  
  
• The Government should consider a system of "proportionate" and "equity" fines.