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INTRODUCTION
An Audit
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) – established
by the Health and Safety at work Act 1974 - is the
main Government body responsible for enforcing health
and safety law in Britain.
This report is a statistical audit of the core activity
of the HSE – the work undertaken by its ‘operational’
inspectors, that is to say those inspectors who actually
inspect workplaces, investigate reported injuries,
and decide whether or not to impose enforcement notices
or to prosecute. The HSE undertakes many other activities
including research, policy development and standard
setting, but this report does not evaluate these activities.
This report does not scrutinise the work of all of
HSE’s inspectors – only those that work
in it’s Field Operations Directorate (known as
FOD). FOD is the largest directorate within the HSE
and its 419 Field inspectors (which represent two
thirds of all HSE’s Field Inspectors) are responsible
for enforcing the law in 736,000 premises concerned
with construction, agriculture, general manufacturing,
quarries, entertainment, education, health services,
local government, crown bodies, and the police.
This report considers the activities of these inspectors
over a five year period - between 1 April 1996 and
31 March 2001. It looks at the:
• the number of premises that they inspect;
• the number of reported incidents that they
investigate;
• the numbers of enforcement notices that they
impose;
• the numbers of organisations and individuals
that they prosecute;
It looks at how the levels of inspection, investigation,
notices and prosecution differ:
• between five industry groupings – Agriculture,
Construction, Manufacturing, the Energy and Extractive
industries, and the Service sector;
• between different parts of the country ; and
• in each of the last five years;
The report will therefore allow answers to the following
type of questions:
• which industry receives the most inspections?
• which part of the country investigates the
most injuries?
• has the rate of prosecution changed between
1996/7 to 2000/01?
Note
on Scotland
In Scotland, FOD is not responsible for taking
prosecution decisions. This is the decision of
the "Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service".
FOD inspectors will pass details of their investigation
(or inspection) to the Crown Office who, after
looking at the evidence, will decide whether any
prosecution action will be taken. The differences
in the courts and procedures are discussed in
subsequent chapters. |
The
report has three main purposes:
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to
make FOD’s activities more transparent. Although
the HSE produces comprehensive data on the extent
of work-related harm itself, it produces little
data that allows its own activities to be scrutinised
and assessed. It does not produce any information,
for example, on comparative levels of inspection
and investigation or on the number of deaths and
major injuries that result in prosecution. |
| • |
to
make FOD (and HSE) more accountable. This report
raises a number of questions concerning the sufficiency
of HSE resources, the adequacy of its enforcement
policies and apparent inconsistencies in its enforcement
record in different parts of the country and between
different industries. It is hoped that this report
will result in the HSE itself being more willing
to publish similar information in the future and
to explain apparent inconsistencies in its performance. |
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to
assist in the process of policy reform. Although
it is not always practicable, it is important
that arguments about reforms of the HSE should,
as far as possible, be evidence-based. This report
contains statistical information that should assist
Government, (and those wishing to lobby Government),
with information crucial to a number of current
debates concerning HSE reform including, for example,
those relating to the adequacy of HSE’s investigation
and prosecution policy and whether or not HSE
is adequately resourced.
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It
is the first time that such an audit has been undertaken.
The
Data
The tables in this report have been compiled after
analysing raw HSE data. The data was extracted
from FOD’s ‘Focus’ database –
created in 1996 - which contains details of all
registered workplaces and reported incidents and
into which inspectors input information on their
contacts with workplaces and details of any enforcement
action. The names of workplaces and the names
of injured or deceased persons were not provided. |
This
report has six chapters. The first two concern the
levels of inspection and investigation - the means
by which inspectors can gain access to workplaces
and assess whether organisations and individuals are
complying with health and safety law. Whilst inspections
(considered in Chapter Two) are supposed to be unplanned
visits to workplaces, investigations (considered in
Chapter Three) are visits in response to a reported
incident of one kind or another, such as an injury
or a dangerous occurrence.
Chapters Three and Four consider the level of ‘formal’
enforcement action – legal notices or prosecutions
- taken by inspectors when they discover, in the course
of an inspection or investigation, that there is evidence
of a breach of health and safety law. Chapter Three
deals with the numbers of ‘enforcement notices’.
There are two main types – an ‘improvement’
and a ‘prohibition’ notice. In order to
impose an improvement notice the inspector must be
of the view that there has been a contravention of
a provision of health and safety law. The notice will
state that particular changes must be made within
a particular time period. A prohibition notice –
which stops an identified activity - can only be imposed
when an inspector is of the view that there is or
will be a risk of serious injury if this activity
continued.
Chapter Four deals with levels of prosecutions. In
order for a prosecution to take place an inspector
must be able to collect evidence to prove that an
organisation or individual has failed to comply with
a provision of health and safety law. A prosecution
can take place in either the magistrates court (where
fines are either a maximum of £5000, for a breach
of a regulation, or £20,000, for breach of a
statute) or they can take place in the Crown court
where fines are unlimited.
Chapter Five allows the reader to look at, and compare,
the performance of each of the HSE Areas and industry
groupings across a number of key indicators at a glance.
It also groups together the HSE Areas into the seven
geographical Regions which HSE has now organised itself.
Chapter six – the conclusion - provides an overview
of the data, considers the policies developed by the
HSE in relation to inspection, investigation and enforcement
and what reforms are required.
It is important to note the limitations of this report.
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this
is a quantitative rather than a qualitative analysis,
that is to say it only contains analysis of how
much of a particular activity inspectors are undertaking;
it does not look at how well the inspectors are
doing it. It is important to keep this in mind
since it could be argued, for example, in the
context of limited resources, that 50 rigorous
investigations are preferable to 100 cursory ones.
The report does not contain any information on
the quality of HSE inspections or investigations. |
| • |
the
accuracy of the report depends upon the reliability
of the data provided by the HSE. Inevitably, there
will have been some errors when the data was initially
entered into its database and also when the data
was extracted for our use. |
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the
data is not absolutely comprehensive. The data
was provided by the HSE in Mid 2001. and this
means that many prosecutions relating to inspections
or investigations since 1999 will not have taken
place. As a result we have limited our analysis
of prosecution data to incidents prior to April
1999 |
Despite
those limitations, it is hoped that this report will
facilitate a much greater understanding than ever
before of the manner in which HSE conducts its core
activities and will provide a real opportunity to
initiate an informed debate about the enforcement
policies and procedures of the HSE and the financial
context in which they currently operate.
HSE
Inspectors
In the HSE, there are two main types of inspectors:
(a) ‘Field inspectors’ who are responsible
for day to day inspections and investigations
and (b) ‘Specialist inspectors’ who
provide expert back up to the Field Inspectors.
However not all field inspectors actually do the
day to day inspection and investigation. –
it depends on their grade or ‘band’.
| • |
Band
4 is the grade at which inspectors are recruited.
They will remain in this band whilst they
are in training. |
| • |
Band
3 is the main grade for HSE inspectors.
These are the inspectors who are primarily
concerned with the HSE's day to day inspections
and investigations. |
| • |
Band
2 is the grade for inspectors known as 'Principal
Inspectors'. They manage the Band 3 inspectors. |
The number of Grade 3 Field Inspectors determine
the number of inspections and investigations
FOD Inspector Numbers – by Grade Total
|
0 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
TOTAL |
| Field |
5 |
26 |
124 |
419 |
145 |
719 |
| Specialist |
2 |
7 |
28 |
48 |
0 |
85 |
| TOTAL |
7 |
33 |
152 |
467 |
145 |
804 |
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