Risk and personality

I was talking to a senior safety manager at one of the big transport groups yesterday. She said they're starting a project to risk assess people's attitudes and personality types alongside the more traditional activity-based assessments.


They want to find out, and control for, some people's increased willingness to run red lights.


She says it'll be a long project and will only pay off over a couple of years if at all, but it fits with their competency based approach to recruiting people with the right aptitudes for any job.

I'm hoping we'll get a chance to cover it in HSW when it's a bit further advanced. In the meantime I'd be interested if anyone has examples of other organisations who've tried this kind of approach.

Smart lawyers

I was talking to health and safety lawyer Stuart Armstrong of McGrigors yesterday about the way personal injury lawyers have become much more clued up in the way they pursue work-related claims. Where there has been an accident at work and the HSE is investigating for a possible criminal prosecution, the victim's PI lawyers will often wait for the HSE's case to be decided before taking their claim to court.

Armstrong says one neat trick on the part of the PI lawyers is to request diclosure of safety documentation such as risk assessments from the employer, and if they don't get it, to mention it to the HSE investigators with the implication that the company may have something it wants to hide in that area.

A new benchmark for fatality fines

Ofwat (water regulator) head Regina Finn was on the radio just now explaining why she had fined SevernTrent water £38.5 million for misreporting its customer service ratings.

Finn said the penalty is 3% of Severn Trent's annual turnover and that it is "proportionate and appropriate" and will act as "a deterrent to this kind of behaviour".

The Sentencing Guidelines Council has been consulting since November on new guidelines for judges setting fines for corporate manslaughter convictions and prosecutions for fatalities under the Health and Safety at Work Act. Their draft recommended fines of between 2.5% and 7.5% of a company's annual turnover for HSW Act convictions, but there has been speculation that these percentages might be reduced to less punitive levels.

Now we know the order of magnitude of the offence of fibbing to a regulator about your customer satisfaction levels is a 3% penalty, let's hope the final advice on what it should cost a business to neglect employees' safety to the point of fatality doesn't set the bar any lower.

Harriet Harman goes protected

So Harriet Harman feels the need of a stab-proof vest when she tours Peckham. Perhaps she lives in fear of Sabatier-wielding Labour voters rushing at her shouting "You robbed Alan Johnson of the deputy leadership!" or "This is what you get for voting for top-up fees!".

Sadly, the greatest risk she probably faced was that no one would recognise her, even with a police escort.