EDITORIAL: HEALTH AND SAFETY GONE MAD?

I attended an event for non-executive directors last month on directors’ responsibilities and risks under health and safety and it certainly provided much food for thought.

One of the speakers, we’ll call him Mr X, shared his own experiences which were very unsettling indeed.

He was a property developer and a director of a company originally set up by his brother. The company was renovating some houses and there was concern about the state and safety of the basement floor. So, the company asked its external health and safety advisor to inspect it, which he did.

They weren’t completely happy with what he said so the team working on the house were instructed not to do any work in the basement until they could investigate further and to work on the outside of the property where there was plenty that needed doing. But they didn’t close the site down.

Then it snowed. And the team went inside the house where it was warmer and ignored instructions not to work in the basement as a result, a wall collapsed crushing one of the workers to death.

The HSE and the police investigated and decided that, as the director who was – on paper at least – in charge of this particular project, they would prosecute him personally.

Mr X came across as a diligent and honest man whose whole life was traumatised by what happened. The person who died had been a personal friend so there was all the emotion and guilt associated with that. There was a knock-on effect on his wife and children as a result of press coverage and local ill-feeling.

Because of the accident, contracts started to dry up and soon the brother felt he had no alternative but to close down the business.

When the case finally came to court, the health and safety advisor was found not to have inspected the trench thoroughly enough and he was sentenced to 8 months in prison. And the director was found personally liable for the man’s death and was sentenced to three years and three months imprisonment in Wandsworth jail in London, a life-changing experience.

I appreciate that the written word cannot communicate this situation as compellingly as hearing the testimony of Mr X himself, but it is a chilling tale to show that it really is important for all directors to take health and safety seriously. Albeit some sectors are more prone to accidents than others and construction is certainly one of those sectors, in 2021/2022 throughout the UK 123 workers were killed at work and there were over 625,000 non-fatal injuries. 

It is not just the eyewatering fines that can be imposed on companies for infractions in health and safety law, it’s the very personal and reputational consequences for individual directors that arise from them.