HSE report shows serious under-prosecuting
HSE report shows serious under-prosecuting.
The Centre for Corporate Accountability have obtained papers which show that the HSE may be taking prosecutions far less often than they should under their own rules. An internal audit undertaken by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) into enforcement decisions by both HSE and Local Authority (LA) inspectors was published last year and showed that of 126 cases looked at, the panel agreed with the investigating inspector's decision in 108 of the cases. There were no cases where the panel felt that the inspector had been over-zealous. There were 18 cases where the panel felt they would have taken significantly stronger action, including 12 instances where they thought a prosecution was probably appropriate. However the CCA claims that the full report shows that the audit team found that inspectors should have prosecuted in a total of 19 cases - 12 more than the 7 cases that actually resulted in criminal charges. This is triple the number of cases than were actually prosecuted. David Bergman, Executive Director of the Centre for Corporate Accountability said: 'The report suggests that rather than prosecuting around 700 cases the HSE should be prosecuting close to 2000 cases each year. The HSE should be apologising for this failure - for the lack of accountability for bereaved families and injured workers as well as for undermining the deterrent effect which would result from effective enforcement. Real improvements to ensuring enforcement action, in line with HSE's own policies, must be made.'
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