Campaigners criticise HSE stance on directors' duties

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is failing to make the case for legal safety duties on directors, according to the Centre for Corporate Accountability (CCA).

This month the Health and Safety Commission (HSC) decided to postpone further discussion of imposing safety duties on individual directors until after the government’s revised Corporate Manslaughter Bill is published. Unions want directors’ duties included in the bill, but the government has resisted the proposal.

At its December 2005 meeting, the HSC had asked the HSE to “explore the possibilities of a duty on directors” by April this year. But the discussion was heavily skewed by HSE mandarins, who produced a draft regulatory impact assessment that was biased towards voluntary guidance rather than legal duties.

The CCA claims that directors’ actions on health and safety are “very, very uneven”, and that the HSE ignored research supporting the imposition of legal duties.

“[The HSC] asked the HSE to come up with options for legal change, not to ‘examine a number of approaches to further motivate directors’,” said the CCA’s UK director, Maggie Robbins. “The assumption that issuing more guidance to directors will cause more directors to improve health and safety performance, in the absence of increased enforcement, is unsupported by data. Attributing any savings in lives, health, or money to this option is pure wishful thinking.”