Terry Woolmer

The latest Sentencing Council guidelines for health and safety offences have raised the bar. 2016 will be a game changer for companies or individuals who deliberately or inadvertently commit health and safety offences.

Britain has one of the leading health and safety records in the world, yet the Sentencing Council has decided that companies and individuals should be subject to much higher levels of fines. While this might be appropriate in certain cases, it does not seem much of a reward for the very many companies that have made huge strides in making their workplaces both healthy and safe.

The proposed starting point for fines for all sizes of company seems to be excessive (considering the GB’s good health and safety track record) when compared with historical fine levels and could be seen by some as an indirect Government tax designed to increase Treasury revenues.

Too much emphasis is being placed on fines and the level of fines instead of ‘remedial orders’ to bring about lasting improvements to health and safety management systems and practices.

‘Fine tables’ (starting points and ranges) for organisational health and safety and corporate manslaughter offences should be re-expressed in terms of company profitability or equivalent, not the size of turnover in relation to the size of firm.

Successive governments have had concerns about health and safety and the perceived impact on business productivity and innovation. A major review led to a much needed reconfiguration of the British health and safety system. The HSE has been instrumental in challenging risk adverse cultures.

The biggest challenge will be in making sure that companies and the individuals working in them are not found culpable because they failed to foresee exposure to risk which later led to harm.

What behaviours will this elicit? The biggest danger is that the new guidelines may take us back to that risk adverse landscape we have all endeavoured to escape. Rather than driving health and safety forward, the positive progress of recent years could be undone.

Terry Woolmer, head of Health & Safety Policy at EEF, the manufacturers’ organisation