Fat Cat Directors and Health and Safety Law

“Health and safety is a priority for those at the top of all organisations and they must be prepared to face the consequences of ignoring the law; in future that could well mean prison”

It already does. In fact, custodial sentences for directors (and others) have been possible since 1974 at least. (The introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act.) So why have only five individuals been detained at Her Majesties pleasure? Why have only eight Directors been disqualified since the introduction of the 1986 Company Director’s Disqualification Act? The following will provide a background to the current legislation applicable to the UK, discuss its effectiveness, and the effect that new legislation proposed by the current government will have on the situation.

Background to current health and safety legislation

Modern day law represents the accepted opinion that preventing an accident from happening is better than mitigating it’s consequences. This has not always been the case. In earlier times, it was thought that making an employer pay compensation to workers who have suffered as the result of

So, with average company fines of only £5,558, and senior management fines of under £4000, there is little incentive for companies and their senior managers to pay attention to health and safety. One could argue that these are adjusted fines, and that some large companies do receive fines of over £100,000 – there were 22 of them last year. But these are the very companies that can afford to pay such fines without any problem. A company that received a fine of £200,000 recently for seriously injuring an employee had just paid its shareholders £9.5 Million in dividends. Fines and convictions of this nature certainly won’t make senior management wary of the consequences of ignoring the law.

The current legislation allows for the prosecution of companies for breach of the Act or subsidiary regulations. In such cases, a company can receive unlimited fines. Last year there were 22 fines of over £100,000, and ten of these were over £200,000.

Article 118A required member states to pay particular attention to encouraging improvements to the health and safety of workers, and to achieve harmonisation of conditions in this area. This was not directly enforceable by the EC as per other regulations. It merely allowed for the EC to adopt, by means of directives, minimum requirements on health and safety.

What effect does the legislation have on injury rates?

Some topics in this essay:
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