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Embargoed,
0.01 am 6 Dec 2005
Safety Body must support Directors' law reform - and
reject civil servant advice
The
Health and Safety Commission (HSC) has been advised
by its civil servants not to propose a change in the
law that would impose safety duties upon company directors.
On
Tuesday 6 December the HSC is meeting in a public
session to decide whether or not to advise Government
on the necessity of legal change.
The
advice - given by civil servants within the Health
and Safety Executive (HSE) - has been provided despite
the fact that the HSE's own commissioned research
itself concluded that the evidence supported change
in the law. It is also despite no director of a medium
or large sized company ever having been convicted
of a health and safety offence.
In
a letter sent today to the Health and Safety Commission,
the Centre for Corporate Accountability's chair, Professor
Steve Tombs said:
[T]he
‘advice’ provided by the Health and Safety
Executive in its paper to the Commission cannot
be described as an independent paper providing a
fair assessment of the evidence and other factors
relevant to his issue.
Almost
every paragraph is problematic – in either
not being a fair representation of the evidence,
in its irrelevance, in its failure to provide evidential
backing, or in its partiality. Not only does the
HSE fail to represent the research evidence in a
fair manner (and fails to explain that this shows
how imposing legal duties would be more effective
than voluntary guidance), it’s main arguments
against imposing duties – that they would create
‘disproportionate risk averseness, bureaucratic
response, or administrative burdens’ has no
research basis at all. It is just supposition and
speculation – reflecting a particular rhetoric
commonly employed by employer organisations facing
the threat of increased accountability. Indeed the
evidence provided by HSE’s own research is
that the majority of directors support legal duties."
The
CCA has also sent a detailed response to the HSE paper
and urged the Commission to reject the advice.
The
HSC has been asked by the Government for its advice
on this issue following a recommendation by the Select
Committee on Work and Pensions earlier this year that
the law needed to be changed.
David Bergman, Director of the CCA said that:
"The
research, commissioned by the HSE itself, all points
in the direction of the benefits of imposing legal
duties – benefits in improving the safety management
within companies and in holding directors to account
under existing offences. Britain would certainly
not be out of place by so doing, since in many countries
duties are imposed on directors.
Imposing positive duties would set out clearly what
is expected of directors, would mean that directors
could not avoid their responsibilities by simply
remaining uninformed of what is going on in their
organisation, and would mean that directors responsibilities
could be enforced in a more straightforward manner
through enforcement notices."
Currently,
the law does not impose any positive obligations on
directors, or their equivalent in public bodies, to
take steps to ensure that their organisation complies
with health and safety law.
The
Centre for Corporate Accountability is a charity
advising those bereaved from work-related deaths,
and working on issues of safety, law enforcement
and corporate accountability.
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