Making Companies Safe - what works? (CCA ... - Unite the Union

Also, presentation of the moral and social case to a more general audience would be
expected to bring benefits in terms of creating support for and acceptance of new legislation,
HSE enforcement activity, and the need for HSE to be adequately resourced. It might also help
to create an environment where accusations of over-zealous enforcement and burdensome
and unnecessary regulatory restrictions are given little credence.
However, presentation of the moral and social case is undermined by inadequate resourcing
and under-enforcement of existing regulations since it conveys an impression that
Government does not take violation of health and safety law seriously. Campaigns to ‘win
hearts’ in other contexts – for example in relation to the unacceptability of domestic violence
or speeding – report that a combination of educational techniques and a ‘zero tolerance’
approach to enforcement of the law have been most effective. Perhaps the same
lessons could be usefully applied in the context of occupational health and safety.
Reputational Risk and Other HSE Initiatives
Where fear of adverse publicity and loss of corporate credibility is a significant motivator for
large, reputationally sensitive firms, or firms operating in high-risk sectors, the evidence
suggests that there are other regulatory and legal strategies that are likely to be effective.
These include: mandatory occupational health and safety performance reporting; formal
‘adverse publicity’ orders; the regular and widespread naming and shaming of non-compliant
and dangerous organisations and their directors. 72
HSC/E has gone some way towards developing new levers that might be expected to
motivate large employers’ concern for their image and credibility. For instance, the HSC/E have
developed a Health and Safety Performance Index for use by investors and insurers,
challenged top 350 FTSE firms to publicise their health and safety performance in Annual
Reports, and created an offences database that can be accessed directly by the public.
However, recent HSC/E initiatives may be failing to fully take advantage of companies’
reputational fears. For instance, the publication of health and safety information in Annual
Reports is an entirely voluntary initiative and as such may not provide a sufficient incentive to
companies to improve their performance. In relation to the publication of HSE’s prosecutions
and notices database, the HSE contemplated and then rejected the option of publishing a
league table which ranked offenders either according to number of convictions per year or
according to size of fines. 73
The HSE expressed a number of reservations concerning the publication of a league table,
including concerns that a league table could “harm investment and contract success
(especially in relation to SMEs)”, and that publication of a league table “risks general criticism
and a bad reaction from industry… on the basis that we are fostering a culture of blaming
employers and pursuing them in an oppressive manner.” Instead the HSE opted to publish
convictions on a continuous basis on their website. The HSE prosecutions and notices
database can hardly be said to entail a public ‘shaming’ of the worst health and safety
offenders since offenders are not ranked, and it does appear from the reservations expressed
by HSE that shaming offenders was precisely what the HSE wanted to avoid. It is also
interesting to note that whilst it has been proposed that the HSE should undertake “further
work to increase the exercise of client pressure”, 74 the HSE also appear to be more concerned
about harming contract success for individual companies through the publication of adverse
health and safety information.
Promoting the Positive?
Since research suggests that poor health and safety perfomance may negatively impact on a
company’s reputation, but that the converse is not true – that is, good health and safety
performance does not currently offer a competitive advantage to firms 75 – it has been argued
that strategies should also be devised to publicise and reward good performance. 76 There are
already a number of such initiatives at both national and European levels. However, the
question of what performance to award is absolutely crucial and one problem with
these initiatives has been that companies awarded for good OHS practices in one area have
subsequently been found to be poor performers in relation to some other aspect of OHS.
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