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This
is an excerpt from the final report of Committee on
Environment, Trasnport and the Regions which reviwed
the work of the HSE in 1999.
POLICY
ON INVESTIGATIONS
| 31 |
Given the very low proportion of reported injuries
investigated by the HSE, we were interested in
how it determines which accidents deserve to be
investigated. The Director General of the HSE
told us that a decision to investigate was based
on a number of criteria relating to :
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the
extent of the breach of the law; |
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the severity of the harm done; |
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the
company's track record; |
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whether
an investigation would produce lessons that
could be applied elsewhere or would be a
useful deterrent; |
| - |
the level of public concern; and |
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where
appropriate, the likelihood of a successful
prosecution.[48] This was expanded upon
in supplementary evidence provided by the
HSE.[49] |
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| 32 |
The
HSE made it clear that it was not its intention
to investigate every accident, primarily due to
"diminishing returns"[50] and because
there were other, perhaps more effective, ways
of getting the message across.[51] However, other
witnesses did not agree with this policy. The
Centre for Corporate Accountability argued that
injuries or deaths should be treated with the
same urgency and seriousness as other crimes and
should not be afforded greater leniency simply
because they occurred in a workplace.[52] Or as
Mr Dalton, a health and safety professional and
author of a number of books on the subject, put
it, "why should being killed by a brick be
less of a crime inside the workplace than out?"[53]
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| 33 |
Witnesses
pointed out that public concern about the level
of investigations of injuries was increasing.
Partly in response to this, the HSE has decided
to look again at a large sample of accidents which
were reported but not selected for investigation.
The purpose of the exercise, the HSE told us,
was to establish whether the existing investigation
criteria had been properly applied and the extent
of non-investigation in circumstances when the
Commission's and Executive's policies would require
investigation to take place. The results of the
review are included in the HSE's supplementary
evidence.[54] |
| 34 |
We
welcome the HSE's review of investigation criteria
as we are concerned that there are potentially
many injuries which it should have investigated.
We are pleased that the HSE intends to re-open
those cases where the original decision not to
investigate was judged to be wrong. |
| 35 |
However,
we continue to have some concerns about how the
criteria which determine which injuries will be
investigated, are applied by HSE inspectors. Decisions
in the past appear to have been unduly dictated
by availability of resources. While the HSE needs
to operate within its resource limitations, we
believe that it should develop more detailed guidance
for inspectors. In particular, more thought should
be given to a) how to 'weight' the criteria, since
some should surely have more influence than others
and b) whether some categories of very serious
injuries should automatically trigger an investigation
in the same way that fatalities do. Such a system
would mean that decisions on whether to investigate
would be more rigorously based and more transparent
which would ultimately lead to a greater consistency
in application between inspectors. We urge the
HSE to use its review to address these issues. |
| 36 |
We
are also concerned about those cases where the
HSE fails to investigate an injury and an individual
is subsequently successful in bringing a civil
case against an employer. We recommend that the
HSE provide a list of such cases in their annual
report, identifying the lessons learnt and the
action taken, to ensure that in the future such
cases will be investigated. We recommend that,
unless there is evidence that the HSE is responding
to this concern, the Government consider taking
action against the HSE. |
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To
see the whole of the Select Committee Report,
click
here |
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To
read the CCA's evidence to the select Committee,
click here
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