A report brought out by the Hazards campaign has shown that the government’s Health and Safety Executive have been deliberately not prosecuting offending companies and culling records of offenders from its website.
A series of 20 Freedom of Information requests have shown that the number of prosecutions by the government watchdog has dropped by a third over the last year since the executive brought in a new ‘business-friendly’ strategy.
HSE brought 712 prosecutions in 2004/05, down from 928 in 2003/04. It secured just 673 convictions, down from 887 the preceding year.
The executive had stressed that this was due to a new focus on ‘naming and shaming’ companies who broke health and safety laws on its website. But the campaign found during its investigation that the executive had actually done the opposite, stripping large numbers of names from its database.
The organisation’s second big initiative is the Large Organisations Pilot Project, which invites companies to self-regulate. Of the first five companies to sign up, four have had recent criminal convictions for safety. The companies encompass 1m workers.
A private company using the Health and Safety Executive’s brand will also be used for ‘advisory workplace visits’, but will not be able to enforce compliance on companies. Just under 10% of the executive’s total budget is now spent on external consultants.
According to the Hazards report: “HSE is shifting away from inspections and the inspections it does undertake are not what they used to be. Inspectors now undertake quickie single topic inspections, instead of giving a workplace a thorough evaluation. Get one thing right and a firm may get a clean bill of health. The majority of major injuries at work do not result in a visit from an HSE inspector.
“HSE has neither the data nor the research to justify its shift.”
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