He likes it?

Backed by unions, the Health and Safety (Directors Duties) Bill was given its first reading in January. It sought to define who is responsible if a company breaks health and safety law. If anything could nail negligent directors, this was it.

Predictably, the Construction Confederation, representing many large contractors, booed. CM asked the Confederation’s health and safety director, Andy Sneddon, for an interview. What was behind his stance? Cynical sophistry to protect the status quo, or something deeper?

Boy, did we expect fur to fly! But face to face he told us that, having actually read the bill, he liked it. As CM went to press, the bill was due for a second reading. So have we finally stumbled across a legislative approach to corporate killing that both workers and employers support?

Do you support this bill now because you think it’s too weak to work?

Andy Sneddon: No. We now have a bill that is realistic, that takes a pragmatic view of the realities of managing a construction company, or any other company. And it explicitly recognises that accountability has to be spread around all those in a company. Clearly the direction should come from the controlling mind of the company and this bill reinforces that. This isn’t a case of the bill being watered down to a point where we as employers feel that we can embrace it. We think somebody has now thought with a little bit more sophistication about what will actually promote good practice.

What’s your problem with corporate manslaughter legislation, anyway?

Sneddon: The initial proposals would have made it easier to throw managers and directors in jail. It was a vehicle to get round the difficulties we’ve currently got with manslaughter, that is, connecting the controlling mind of a company to an act, or an omission, that has led to a fatal accident. We were very uncomfortable with that because it would drive people away from taking ownership of health and safety in companies and mean that health and safety advisors or individual managers would have these responsibilities dumped on them, and boards of directors would close their eyes and their ears to the way the company was being run — because if they had first-hand knowledge they would be liable to imprisonment. But also we don’t feel it was just to lower the threshold of proof purely to meet public opinion, fed by prejudice and ignorance, about how a company is run, just to get managers banged up in prison.

Won’t this bill encourage scapegoating?

Sneddon: Not the way I read it. I’d like to think that’s because they realised there was a risk, by appointing a health and safety director [who takes sole responsibility], of absolving all the other directors, which is a disastrous situation. This bill creates a post where a director is responsible for communication of all the key information that other directors need to manage their part of the business, and I’ve seen that first-hand working for companies. To have a real effect as a senior health and safety person you need to be able to influence and involve the finance director, the facilities director, all the way up to the chief executive.

Why the knee-jerk reaction against it in the beginning?

Sneddon: We’ve been campaigning against a tendency of some lobby groups to try and scapegoat directors. That has worried us a lot because we don’t want to build a deterrent into the legal framework for good managers and good directors to take on responsibility. That’s what a good manager should do, he should accept his responsibility and not feel that by doing that he leaves himself open to personal liability to the point of going to prison for his trouble. This new bill walks the right sort of line between specifying key legal individual responsibilities and reinforcing that corporate culture, which is what we want to see enhanced.

How would this bill be effective?

with this bill, somebody has thought about what will promote good practice

Andy Sneddon

Sneddon: It would be more of a corporate duty in terms of annual reports and submission to Companies House specifying who was your health and safety director, and it would be an offence not to name anybody in that role. So, If I’m a finance director and I refuse to spend money to buy safety equipment or access scaffolding for a project on cost grounds, despite the advice given to me by the health and safety director, clearly there would be trail of evidence that would incriminate them.

Does it mark a move away from a voluntary approach of self-regulation to a law with more teeth?

Sneddon: I think it does. But there’s an irony here because there’s a drift in the HSE towards goal-setting and away from specification, and yet this bill starts to be more prescriptive in terms of what management duties should be. Having said that there’s a long history in this country of employers being very comfortable with prescription particularly on technical issues: work at height, whether you provide shoring up for excavations beyond a certain depth, that sort of thing. I don’t think there will be a great deal of negative response. Some directors might take some comfort in seeing what they’re expected to do.

Research says 15% of companies have no board-level involvement in health and safety and they don’t plan to.

Will this bill change that?

Sneddon: What you might find is that the majority of that 15% still don’t get actively involved and they prefer the risk of being struck off as a director to the prospect of being held to account with a manslaughter conviction.

Do you think that main contractors are actually able to control site activity?

Sneddon: I think that through the CDM regulations they’ve got the teeth to go out there and take control on site and certainly on the better-managed projects we see it can be done and done well. Terminal Five. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Incredibly complex, difficult working environments being well managed and tightly controlled by a principal contractor. So there’s no reason why not. Having said that, both of those examples have got well-motivated and responsible clients. Now there will be instances when the client is cost driven and puts the project under enormous pressure on safety issues but by and large, with a motivated board and a motivated management team a principal contractor has all the tools at its disposal to manage a project properly.

So will you lobby to see it passed?

Sneddon: I don’t think we’re going to devote a great deal of time to supporting it because, quite frankly, we don’t think there will be enough parliamentary time to see it through. That’s just a fact of life with a private member’s bill. But what is significant is that we’re not lobbying to oppose it.