Corporate killing - No one's talking

We've had a writer approaching major organisations asking them how they have prepared for the corporate manslaughter law, due next April, for a feature we planned to run next month. She's gone to a series of big companies and one by one they've all come back and said they don't want to talk about it.

I was never expecting any great revelations from the piece, probably just some senior health and safety people saying they had run a thorough check on their policies and procedures, risk assessments and training regimes and concluded they would be proof against any prosecution for systematic failures to protect employees.

Health and safety isn't one of those areas where people are loathe to talk about what they are doing for reasons of competitive advantage; in fact it's a joy for a journalist how open practitioners are, and how keen to share their experiences, even when they are of the "we-got-prosecuted-and-that-made-us really-wake-up-and-improve-things" variety, which might make people in other disciplines taciturn.

So why is nobody talking to us about this? Is it that they are afraid that if they say they've checked and they are safe, they'll be giving hostages to fortune in the event of a fatality? Or is there something I'm missing?

First sign of a backlash?

Just when I'd despaired of ever hearing anything in the mass media but the standard attacks on health and safety as the fount of all nannying and pointless rules, I caught the following at the weekend on BBC Radio 4''s topical comedy offering, The Now Show, in a discussion about how much we like to knock modern Christmas.

Hugh Dennis: "On Tuesday there was a particularly fine example of this in The Daily Express which published a survey showing that 'age-old traditions like slipping a silver sixpence in the pudding or roasting chestnuts on a roaring log fire are slowly being phased out amid health and safety fears'."

Steve Punt: "That's right, health and safety fears. Nothing to do with people not having log fires, and sixpences not having existed since 1971."

It's not much, but it's a start.

Counting up

I've been ruminating on the proposals by the government's Sentencing Advisory Panel that courts should levy fines of 10% of annual turnover on firms found guilty of the new offence of corporate manslughter (see http://www.healthandsafetyprofessional.co.uk/file/cc21d458a5eaf930f920841fdd64bd53/firms-guilty-of-corporate-killing-could-pay-10-of-turnover.html ). In some of the most publicised safety cases involving fatalities in previous years (think of the last decade's rail crashes), we've calculated that a successful prosecution for the new offence, if it had existed then, would have cost the businesses involved hundreds of millions of pounds apiece - £600 milion in one case.

If the recommendations are accepted and and the courts use them even once (and these are big ifs), the risk of such a dent in profitability will push health and safety onto the agendas of board meetings in a way that no amount of nagging from the HSE and the Institute of Directors and soft guidelines on directors' responsibilities could ever do.

Extreme caution

There's a piece in the Times today about corporate events companies giving up offering the more hazardous activities (whitewater rafting, bungee jumping, quad biking) normally favoured by accountancy firms and broking houses as teambuilding or development exercises.
The reason given in the article is that the events planners are afraid they will be liable to corporate manslaughter charges if anybody dies in their care. Some of their clients have apparently ruled these activities out of bounds where providers will still provide them, fearing the same exposure.

Now even if (and it seems to me a big if) a fatality at an outward bound centre was ever likely to trigger a corporate manslaughter prosecution rather than a charge under the Health and Safety at Work Act, there's a worrying implication there that the organisers and their clients are only taking full account of the risk involved in these activities now that their profits would be seriously imperilled by a prosecution (given that the body that advises on penalties has suggested 10% of turnover as a guide fine for juries in corporate killing cases).

The article is at http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article2994773.ece

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30 years on

Welcome to the HSW editor’s blog. I’m taking a few minutes out to write this from reviewing the first ever issue of Health and Safety at Work magazine (from September 1978) to mark the beginning of the title’s 30th anniversary year.

It’s an interesting exercise.The magazine was launched into the brave new world created by the Health and Safety at Work Act, in force only three years at that point, and was partly intended to help make sense of the Act for a health and safety profession that was still in its infancy, and still mostly made up of industrial safety officers - the IIRSM was only three years old and IOSH (which was then the IISO) had only 3000 members.

The HSW Act, with its new empasis on health and safety controls that were "reasonably practicable" and its extension of risk management duties beyond industry to all workplaces, has largely shaped the occupational health and safety environment we know today. But that was all still to happen in 1974, along with a raft of European legislation (we'd only joined the then "Common Market" five years before).

But once you get past the distraction of the 70s hairstyles, the old fashioned layout and some dodgy advertising that wouldn't pass muster today ("It would pay you to employ this attractive cleaner" runs the headline to one ad over a picture of a young woman, and another for outdoor showers features another female completely unclothed in a less-than-modest pose), what really emerges from the pages of our first issue is something more subtle.

There's the impression of a profession confident in the fact that its work was vital, if not always widely understood; a straightforward confidence in the necessity of safeguarding workers from harm. From today's perspective, when health and safety is so often used as a media whipping boy for failings which either don't exist or have nothing to do with sound risk management, it seems almost like an age of innocence.

But that's a reminder for us in the professional media that one of the useful things we can do is provide an oasis from all the unhelpful chaff, which health and safety specialists can come to for information that supports them in their day-to day work (which is as essential as it ever was) and a forum to learn from each other. Our aim for the Health and Safety Professional site is that it will do just that.

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