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?
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