Health and safety works well when we all work on it together, and this is even more the case now, with the imminent HSE strategy’s focus on cooperation and communication.
The second of the panel debates in the SHP Arena at Safety & Health Expo — which had as its broad theme ‘directors’ duties, workforce involvement and the future of health and safety’ — kicked off with a discussion of the Robens-envisaged tripartite system. Responding to a suggestion that this is no longer working and that employers, employees and the regulator now spend much of their time blaming each other when things go wrong, Bud Hudspith — health and safety advisor with Unite the Union — said he didn’t agree. He added: “The aim of any tripartite committee is to find a way to work together, have a healthy debate, and put to one side any major differences.”
IOSH’s director of policy and technical affairs, Richard Jones, concurred saying the idea of the parties fighting and blaming each other may have been true 20 years ago, but “there is more harmony now”. He conceded, however, that the current situation is more complicated, owing to the involvement of many more stakeholders.
Head of parliamentary and regulatory affairs at the Institute of Directors, Alexander Ehmann warned against confusing blame apportioning with grappling with the issues. “The critical thing,” he said, “is to make sure that all those involved in tripartite committees are equal members.”
Opinions differed more widely on the thorny issue of directors’ duties. Andy Sneddon, head of HSS&E at Stansted Airport, said he would welcome the right kind of legislation in this respect, but not a law on individual directors. What would be even better, he suggested, is “to force companies to carry out management reviews of their health and safety systems. A statutory duty to document where they are in managing health and safety would be something that senior directors could be held accountable to.”
Bud Hudspith said the huge amount of interest now being shown by senior management in the new corporate manslaughter legislation is proof that a new law, introducing positive duties, is the best way to focus minds. But Alexander Ehmann was adamant that the existing guidance, produced by the IoD and the HSE is sufficient. He said: “This is a very recognised document among senior managers and I don’t agree that new laws would help. A specific regulatory level would only tell people what they must adhere to but I think you are much more likely to achieve excellence without such prescription.”
Richard Jones agree with both of these views, but said IOSH was more persuaded by research carried out in other jurisdictions, where there are positive health and safety duties on directors, and which have been shown to have a beneficial effect. He went on: “There are four different types of people: the ‘do know and do care’ people, who are doing things well; the ‘don’t know but do care’ camp, who can be persuaded to go in the right direction; the ‘don’t know and don’t care’ camp, who can be worked on; and the ‘do know but don’t care’ lot, who won’t do anything and for whom legislation is the only stick that will persuade them.”
Chair of the debate Steve Pointer, head of health and safety policy at the EEF, reminded everyone that there is some law governing the behaviour of directors in the form of section 37 of the HSWA 1974. This, together with the new corporate manslaughter Act, under which the first charges were recently laid against a Cotswolds company and its director, are far from voluntary, Steve pointed out.
He added: “Director leadership is what we need to focus on. We don’t need any more specific duties than we already have. We don’t want managers to think they’ve done what they need to do, and then do no more.”
Bud Hudspith said the problem with section 37, however, is that it is a secondary duty, i.e. the company has to be found guilty first, before a senior manager can be prosecuted. He went on: “There are too few cases taken under s37. If the HSE got it to work, there might then be a case for arguing that a legal duty does already exist.”
Steve Pointer agreed that there are issues surrounding the way the current law is enforced but maintained that “changing the nature of the duty won’t really affect that”.
Moving on to discuss the new HSE strategy, all but one of the panel members welcomed it as a good document. Alexander Ehmann called it “a good move in the right direction”, while Richard Jones applauded its “inclusive nature”. The dissenting voice belonged to Andy Sneddon, who described it as “woolly, and lacking focus” and said it confused worker involvement with worker representation. He added: “I have no confidence that the HSE has really got inside boardrooms, or that health and safety is couched in business-relevant language”.
Bud Hudspith said the unions welcomed the strategy but he expressed concern over how it will be implemented: “The HSE haven’t got the resources they need, and they are always asking how everyone else is going to implement the strategy for them!”
But Steve Pointer concluded the debate by saying others to have to be involved in its implementation because “health and safety done to people rather than with them doesn’t work. What is important now is what is underneath the strategy: what the HSE and all of us do to deliver it. It will only work if we all join together and link our delivery plans”.
