Penalties for health and safety offences still "disappointing"

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is "disappointed" at the relatively low level of fines being imposed by the courts for breaches of health and safety law.

The HSE's first ever report1 on enforcement activity reveals that the average fine for offenders convicted of health and safety breaches in the 12 months to 1 April 2000 was £6,744. This prompts the Executive to comment: "We cannot avoid a sense of disappointment that the general level of health and safety fines imposed by the courts does not yet seem to reflect the Court of Appeal's view [in a statement in 1998] that they were too low."

We review what the report has to say and summarise some of the more prominent cases in the box below. A second box details the most recent HSE figures on work-related ill health.

Why publish convictions?

There has for several years been pressure on the Health and Safety Commission to raise the profile of its enforcement activity. This culminated in a commitment to publish details of convictions in a statement on revitalising health and safety last year.

The first ever report on convictions for health and safety breaches names hundreds of companies and individuals convicted of a total of 1,600 health and safety crimes in the year to 1 April 2000. The list will be updated periodically on a new convictions web site (www.hse-databases.co.uk/prosecutions/ ). The number of charges for health and safety offences increased by 28% last year, and of the 2,253 laid, only 72 were found not guilty or not proven.

Health and safety prosecutions have a vital role to play in reducing work-related accidents and ill health, according to the HSE's former director general, Jenny Bacon. Writing in the enforcement report, she says: "Successful prosecution, coupled with penalties that properly reflect the gravity of health and safety offences, is an important lever in helping to achieve the Government's and the HSC's targets for reducing the toll of work-related injury and ill health."

The report on enforcement is designed to help would-be customers of companies, together with contractors, investors, employees and insurers, find out about convictions and thereby create pressure for health and safety improvements. Publishing details of crimes may also, the HSE believes, help those with health and safety responsibilities to reflect on areas of their own work where they risk failing to comply with the law.

Enforcement activity

It is often enough for a health and safety inspector to give advice and information to an employer during a visit in order to ensure compliance with health and safety law. However, when inspectors find serious breaches of the law, prosecution is often the only proportionate response. All the cases detailed in the report that were brought to court involved serious breaches with the potential to cause injury or death, or had caused actual harm.

The HSE investigates all work-related deaths and brought prosecutions in a little over 20% of cases involving fatalities last year. The box provides a snapshot of the kinds of cases and fines imposed by the courts in 1999/00.

Most of those organisations and individuals accused of health and safety breaches plead guilty, so that the HSE has a very high conviction rate - of around 80% to 95% if withdrawn charges are excluded. However, fines remain low because many of those prosecuted are small employers and, when deciding on penalties, the courts are obliged to take into account an organisation's ability to pay. So, although the overall average fine rose by almost 40% last year, it is still low at £6,744. The average fine imposed by the higher courts actually fell last year - from £47,277 to £38,782.

The HSE also prosecutes individuals within organisations where it finds sufficient evidence of culpability. Last year, individuals were prosecuted on 48 separate charges, of which 34 led to conviction. The average fine for these separate offences by individuals was £1,236.

Focus on construction

Construction has one of the worst accident and health records of any UK industry - eight people were killed as a result of falling through fragile material on building sites alone last year, whilst 30,000 new musculoskeletal injuries are reported in the industry every year. HSE inspectors will continue to target construction employers through rigorous inspection and enforcement in an effort to improve this situation, the enforcement report states.

Similarly, agriculture has one of the highest fatal injury rates and is the only high-risk industry carried out in the constant presence of children, because farms are homes as well as workplaces. Particular attention was paid by inspectors last year to the safety of children, and this work is set to continue in 2000/01, although other aspects of farming will also be under the microscope, including occupational health issues such as manual handling and respiratory disease.

In the food and drinks sector, a 5% reduction in slip accidents and a 22% fall in overall accident numbers has been achieved as the result of a special initiative on preventing and controlling risks from slips and workplace transport. Elsewhere, in the services sector, inspectors targeted the particular risks associated with asbestos in local government buildings in 1999/00, together with stress in schools, patient handling in the health service and violence to staff across the sector.

1 "Health and safety offences and penalties: a report by the Health and Safety Executive", HSE, October 2000.

London Underground

The tube operator was fined £300,000 following the death of an elderly passenger who fell into the gap between two cars of a Piccadilly line tube train and suffered fatal injuries when the train moved away. A proper check of the operability of the despatch monitors had not been carried out.

Railtrack

A passenger on a train leaned out of a window as the train approached a station in south London and was killed instantly when his head hit a scaffold structure that had been erected very close to the track. Railtrack was fined £200,000 as a result of the offence in December 1999.

Tarmac Construction

A subcontractor was crushed by rotating machinery where there was no secure isolation of machinery during the commissioning phase of a project and Tarmac Construction was fined £110,000 as a result. Two other companies were also prosecuted over the incident in Cardiff.

Friskies Petcare (UK)

An employee was electrocuted and killed while in the process of changing welding equipment; the company was subsequently fined £250,000 for operating an unsafe system of work in a hazardous environment.

Great Western Trains

A failure to conduct an undertaking so as to ensure the safety of passengers resulted in a high-speed train passing a red signal and colliding with an empty train at Southall, resulting in fatalities and a £1.5 million fine for Great Western Trains.

British Steel

A worker was killed when he fell seven metres down an unprotected hatch onto a basement floor at the Port Talbot steelworks. The case was committed to the Crown Court, where the judge imposed a fine of £200,000.

Occupational ill-health headlines

Annual health and safety statistics for 1999/20001 published recently paint a graphic picture of the scale of occupational ill health in Britain, supplementing the information published in the most recent survey of self-reported work-related illness in 1995 (see Work-related illness ). Headlines include:

  • the number of workers assessed for disability benefit due to a prescribed musculoskeletal disorder reached a peak in 1992/93 and has been falling since. However, each year there are thousands of new cases of musculoskeletal disorders requiring some specialist intervention. In 1999, 8,500 people were seen for the first time by rheumatologists and occupational physicians participating in voluntary surveillance schemes;

  • there are around 6,500 new cases of work-related mental health problems in Britain each year, although "this almost certainly under-estimates the true incidence of these conditions in the British workforce," according to the HSC. Voluntary surveillance schemes report that teachers and nurses have the highest incidence of work-related mental ill health. The chart below shows how the number of cases of mental ill health reported by occupational physicians participating in a voluntary surveillance scheme has risen in the past four years;

  • the annual number of deaths from mesothelioma - an asbestos-related disease - has increased rapidly since 1968, from 153 to 1,527 deaths in 1998;

  • there appears to have been a small fall in the annual incidence of new cases of occupational asthma over the past three years;

  • the number of disabling cases of occupational dermatitis has fallen from around 400 a year in the early 1990s to around 200 in the late 1990s;

  • between 2% and 8% of all cancer deaths in Great Britain are estimated to be due to occupational causes;

  • the number of workers with noise-induced deafness qualifying for disablement benefit increased for the first time since the late 1970s in 1998; and

  • the number of new cases of vibration white finger has remained fairly constant over the past four years.

    1 "Health and safety statistics 1999/2000", HSE Books, ISBN 0 7176 1867 6, price £17.50.